All shook up, but nothing changes – conflict, multifunctionality and reprogramming failure in public organisations

Vollständiger Abstract

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Purpose This article addresses a persistent tension in public-sector organisations. Communicative reforms proliferate, conflict becomes more visible and participation expands, yet core decision programmes frequently remain stable. The study asks why conflict rarely culminates in reprogramming of organisational decision premises. Drawing on Luhmann's systems theory, it shifts the explanatory focus from individual expression to organisational selection and retention and develops a structural account of why communicative variation often circulates without becoming programmatically consequential. Design/methodology/approach The article develops a conceptual framework grounded in systems theory. Organisations are theorised as autopoietic decision systems structured by decision premises that condition selection. Feedback, engagement and conflict are reconstructed as differentiated communicative operations. The argument is illustrated through empirical material from a national public legal bureaucracy to demonstrate how conflict-generated variation is processed and retained without premise revision. Findings Conflict introduces communicative negation and expands variation, but transformation depends on retention as modification of decision premises. In multifunctional public organisations, anticipated redistribution of uncertainty across legal, political and reputational couplings raises the threshold for premise revision and favours procedural stabilisation over structural reprogramming. Research limitations/implications The study is conceptual in design and builds on a prior empirical study of a national public bureaucracy (Sales et al., 2025), from which the illustrative material is drawn. The theoretical framework developed here therefore awaits broader empirical examination. Future research should explore comparative and longitudinal configurations to assess how varying degrees of multifunctional coupling shape the conditions under which communicative variation is (or is not) retained as premise revision. Practical implications Of the three communicative mechanisms examined here, conflict is the only one that introduces genuine communication negation, the variation required for reprogramming. Feedback stabilises existing evaluative criteria; engagement expands participation without altering selection. Conflict alone renders established decision premises contestable. Yet even conflict is not sufficient; under multifunctional conditions, it is routinely translated into procedural elaboration rather than premise revision. Practitioners should therefore resist the temptation to manage conflict away. The more productive question is not whether dissent was voiced or resolved, but whether the programmes guiding future decisions have actually changed. Social implications The findings clarify why public reforms often generate visible responsiveness while preserving institutional continuity and legitimacy structures. Originality/value The article introduces the concept of reprogramming failure and specifies a systems-theoretical mechanism linking multifunctionality to selective stabilisation in public organisations.