ABSTRACT
In the human and social sciences, the rule is acknowledged as the “social fact par excellence”: as Michel Foucault stated, “Everything may be thought of within the order of the system, the rule and the norm”; it follows that the concept of regulation is also central to thinking about the organization. In the process-centered approach, which rejects any form of dualism in analyzing the relationship between structure and social action, the rule is immanent to action, both in its planning and in its execution. The theories that view the organization as a system predetermined for the actors tend consistently to reduce regulation to what the process-centered approach regards as one of its possible aspects which, though likely to be absent from organizational action, is still only a part, viz., the set of normative prescriptions.
