Work · Sociology & Social Theory
Social Systems
Systems theory recast with the concept of autopoiesis: social systems consist of communications that produce further communications, and they observe their environment only through their own distinctions.
Introduction
Niklas Luhmann, a former administrative civil servant who taught at the newly founded University of Bielefeld from 1968, regarded Soziale Systeme (1984) as the real beginning of his theory and called his earlier books a “zero series”. The book reworks systems theory with ideas from biology (Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s concept of autopoiesis, self-production), cybernetics and George Spencer-Brown’s logic of distinctions. Social systems consist not of people but of communications, each a unity of information, utterance and understanding; human beings, as psychic and organic systems, belong to society’s environment. Further key concepts are meaning, complexity and double contingency. The book prepared Luhmann’s Theory of Society (1997).
Connections
Builds on
- The Social System1951 · Talcott Parsons
Sources: Wikidata
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