Observing Society: Meaning, Communication, and Social Systems By ...

An Introduction to Contemporary Social System Theory

This book offers a basic introduction to a contemporary theory of social systems, as developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann and other contributors. Social system theory describes society as an autopoietic, self-organizing system that does not include human beings. By using the term autopoiesis, a term adapted from the biologist Humberto Maturana (1981), social system theory asserts that society is a closed social system that produces itself and its environment by recursively connecting its own elements, by establishing selective relations between its ongoing communicative operations. As life produces life, society produces society. Society organizes its elements according to its own logic, selectively steering itself into an open future by meaningfully connecting operation after operation. In this book, we explore the multidisciplinary roots of this new paradigm and assess its tremendous potential to redirect sociological reflection.

Contemporary social system theory creatively builds upon the classical theory of general systems, as developed by Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1950, 1968) and imported into sociology by Talcott Parsons and his colleagues (Parsons 1951, 1963; Parsons and Shils 1951). Modern social system theory incorporates fresh insights gained from cognitive biology, the philosophy of consciousness, phenomenology, distinction theory, socio-cybernetics, and constructivism. The theory maintains that observers recursively self-construct everything that is meaningful in the world, beginning with the difference between themselves and their environment. They use this difference to self-referentially process changes in their environment in the form of other-reference, as if information were externally available. Consulting other-reference, an observer is able to make informed decisions while selectively performing operations. The identity of observer may be attributed to individual people, interaction groups, organizations, functionally differentiated systems (such as the economy, politics, law, and religion), and to society itself. Social system theory is concerned with the second-order observation of differences, distinctions, relations, and boundaries—it is not interested in defining essences, laws,