{
  "id": "department.organizational",
  "term": "department",
  "sense": "organizational",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 16,
  "arena": "department",
  "domain": "emergence",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "a section of a system that organizes people and resources to do a role",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "section.portion",
      "groups.collection",
      "role.social",
      "organized.structure",
      "people.social",
      "resource.material",
      "system.organized"
    ],
    "interaction": "the collection of people and resources organized in a persistent structure around a social role forms a section of a larger organized system",
    "novel_properties": [
      "functional specialization",
      "organized boundary maintenance",
      "role-governed resource flow"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory operates the Deep Space Network to maintain contact with interplanetary missions.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "The New York City Department of Sanitation collects 10,000 tons of waste daily from city blocks.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    },
    {
      "text": "Amazon's fulfillment centers use automated sorting departments to process 100 packages per minute during peak seasons.",
      "domain": "economics"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "section.portion",
      "note": "is-a",
      "type": "is-a"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "department",
    "departments"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "factual",
      "note": "definition was factually incorrect due to under-specified components; added missing constitutive concepts to align record with definition's actual ontological commitments"
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-department.organizational"
}