Reducing uncertainty has always been one of the key achievements of organizations: They define goals and the ways to achieve them, they allocate resources and align the practices of their members with these objectives. They achieve this not least through a structure of roles and responsibilities that detaches their functioning from individuals and their peculiarities. In this way, organizations use responsibilities to create stability and predictability into an uncertain future. Of course, these organizational responsibilities are not necessarily congruent with the actual (causal) responsibility (Hart, 1968) of individual actors for certain organizational actions. Against the backdrop of an increasing complexity of social and technical systems in modernity, the very idea of attributing individual responsibility may seem outdated and even pre-modern (Besio, 2014). But nonetheless, for organizations there is unfolding room for practical negotiations on the attribution of effects to individual actors that can be made productive in limiting uncertainty – especially under the concept of “decision” (Brunsson, 1990).

However, uncertainty seems to have grown to a challenging level: in times of multiple, overlapping crises of global proportions, uncertainty is no longer just a theoretical prerequisite of social practice in general, but an actual condition of everyday life that is perceptible to individual as well as organizational actors. Higher Education organizations are particularly affected by this development insofar as they find themselves in an ambivalent situation: On the one hand, orientation towards the future is inherent to them as a task and responsibility; on the other hand, they are particularly dependent on the reliability of future developments in connection with their concrete operations.

As a symposium in network 32 at ECER 2024, we would like to explore the manifold relationships between uncertainty and responsibility in higher education organizations and their effects on organizational education.

Generally, we believe that at least three forms of this relationship between uncertainty and responsibility in higher education organizations can be distinguished, that shall be explored in the symposium:

1. How does increasing societal uncertainty lead to an increased invocation of responsibility within higher education organizations? As uncertainty increases in times of multiple crises, many traditional management strategies that are based on comprehensible cause-and-effect relationships and the ability to plan for the future prove futile. Attributing responsibility, on the other hand, may not ensure more successful management, but it does potentially simplify the handling of uncertainty and the processing of failure. Conversely, the ‘moralization of organization’ that we can witness occasionally could be discussed as a problematic signal: „morality does not solve the complex problems facing organizations; however, moral communication can become a temporarily adequate manner of dealing with uncertainty.“ (Besio, 2014, p. 309)
2. How can responsibility at the same time be maintained in the face of increasing uncertainty within organizations? For organizations, this not only increases uncertainty in their environment, but also within themselves: Particularly with regard to their personnel, changing value patterns lead to a changed meaning of work and changed work structures and forms. At the same time, new technical possibilities (e.g. AI) are changing the content as well as the formal organization of work. This tends to be associated with insecure conditions with changed opportunities for the attribution of responsibility.
3. How comes responsibility into play for breaking up structures and creating uncertainty in order to bring about change in higher education organizations? From an organizational education perspective, however, the question also arises how higher education organizations attribute the responsibility to deliberately create uncertainty - i.e. to question established structures, to consider possible changes, to envision alternative futures. After all, this is an important basis for organizations to maintain an ongoing ability to learn.

Besio, C. (2014). Uncertainty and attribution of personal responsibility in organizations. Soziale Systeme, 19(2), 307–326. https://doi.org/10.1515/sosys-2014-0207 Brunsson, N. (1990). Deciding for responsibility and legitimation: Alternative interpretations of organizational decision-making. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 15(1), 47–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/0361-3682(90)90012-J Hart, H. L. A. (1968). Punishment and responsibility: essays in the philosophy of law. Oxford: Clarendon press.