25,707 research outputs found
Communicative Competencies and the Structuration of Expectations: The creative tension between Habermas' critical theory and Luhmann's social systems theory
I elaborate on the tension between Luhmann's social systems theory and
Habermas' theory of communicative action, and argue that this tension can be
resolved by focusing on language as the interhuman medium of the communication
which enables us to develop symbolically generalized media of communication
such as truth, love, power, etc. Following Luhmann, the layers of
self-organization among the differently codified subsystems of communication
versus organization of meaning at contingent interfaces can analytically be
distinguished as compatible, yet empirically researchable alternatives to
Habermas' distinction between "system" and "lifeworld." Mediation by a
facilitator can then be considered as a special case of organizing historically
contingent translations among the evolutionarily developing fluxes of
intentions and expectations. Accordingly, I suggest modifying Giddens'
terminology into "a theory of the structuration of expectations.
"Meaning" as a sociological concept: A review of the modeling, mapping, and simulation of the communication of knowledge and meaning
The development of discursive knowledge presumes the communication of meaning
as analytically different from the communication of information. Knowledge can
then be considered as a meaning which makes a difference. Whereas the
communication of information is studied in the information sciences and
scientometrics, the communication of meaning has been central to Luhmann's
attempts to make the theory of autopoiesis relevant for sociology. Analytical
techniques such as semantic maps and the simulation of anticipatory systems
enable us to operationalize the distinctions which Luhmann proposed as relevant
to the elaboration of Husserl's "horizons of meaning" in empirical research:
interactions among communications, the organization of meaning in
instantiations, and the self-organization of interhuman communication in terms
of symbolically generalized media such as truth, love, and power. Horizons of
meaning, however, remain uncertain orders of expectations, and one should
caution against reification from the meta-biological perspective of systems
theory
Can Intellectual Processes in the Sciences Also Be Simulated? The Anticipation and Visualization of Possible Future States
Socio-cognitive action reproduces and changes both social and cognitive
structures. The analytical distinction between these dimensions of structure
provides us with richer models of scientific development. In this study, I
assume that (i) social structures organize expectations into belief structures
that can be attributed to individuals and communities; (ii) expectations are
specified in scholarly literature; and (iii) intellectually the sciences
(disciplines, specialties) tend to self-organize as systems of rationalized
expectations. Whereas social organizations remain localized, academic writings
can circulate, and expectations can be stabilized and globalized using
symbolically generalized codes of communication. The intellectual
restructuring, however, remains latent as a second-order dynamics that can be
accessed by participants only reflexively. Yet, the emerging "horizons of
meaning" provide feedback to the historically developing organizations by
constraining the possible future states as boundary conditions. I propose to
model these possible future states using incursive and hyper-incursive
equations from the computation of anticipatory systems. Simulations of these
equations enable us to visualize the couplings among the historical--i.e.,
recursive--progression of social structures along trajectories, the
evolutionary--i.e., hyper-incursive--development of systems of expectations at
the regime level, and the incursive instantiations of expectations in actions,
organizations, and texts.Comment: accepted for publication in Scientometrics (June 2015
Hyperincursive Cogitata and Incursive Cogitantes: Scholarly Discourse as a Strongly Anticipatory System
Strongly anticipatory systems-that is, systems which use models of themselves
for their further development-and which additionally may be able to run
hyperincursive routines-that is, develop only with reference to their future
states-cannot exist in res extensa, but can only be envisaged in res cogitans.
One needs incursive routines in cogitantes to instantiate these systems. Unlike
historical systems (with recursion), these hyper-incursive routines generate
redundancies by opening horizons of other possible states. Thus, intentional
systems can enrich our perceptions of the cases that have happened to occur.
The perspective of hindsight codified at the above-individual level enables us
furthermore to intervene technologically. The theory and computation of
anticipatory systems have made these loops between supra-individual
hyper-incursion, individual incursion (in instantiation), and historical
recursion accessible for modeling and empirical investigation.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1011.324
Farm enterprises as self-organizing systems: A new transdisciplinary framework for studying farm enterprises?
The growing attention to sustainable food production and multifunctional agriculture calls for a multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary research and development perspective on farming, which is able to grasp the environmental, social, technical, and financial aspects of a farm and the dynamic relationship between the farm enterprises and the surrounding world. Our thesis is that a transdisciplinary approach needs to build on a working ontology that goes beyond the epistemology of each discipline and that is not just pieced together of the ontologies connected to these different epistemologies. Based on a review of three prevailing theoretical frameworks within the field of agro-sociology: The farming styles approach, the Bawden approach, and Conway’s agroecosystem approach, we argue that these existing theories do not offer such a theoretical framework. The claim of this paper is that a new concept of a farm enterprise as a self-organizing social system, which combines ideas from Actor-Network theory (ANT) and Luhmann’s theory of social systems, can serve as a useful ontological platform for understanding a farm-enterprise as an entity independent of a scientific observer.
In this framework, each farm is understood as a self-organizing node in a complex of heterogeneous socio-technical networks of food, supply, knowledge, technology, etc. This implies that a farm has to be understood as the way in which these network relationships are organised by the farm as a self-organizing social system. Among all the different possible ways in which to interact with the surrounding world, the system has to select a coherent strategy in order to make the farming processes possible at all.
It will be discussed how this framework may add to the understanding of the continuous development of a heterogeneity of farm strategies and contribute to a more comprehensive view of the fields of regulation and extension
Subject to Surveillance: Genocide Law As Epistemology of the Object
This article analyzes the discourse on genocide from two angles: the legal genesis of the term in the 1940s and subsequent legal capture of the concept of genocide, and a recent socio-political critique of the legal meaning of genocide. The article suggests that a cross-disciplinary critique of genocidal violence not only describes the event and the victim, but also produces knowledge of them as discursive objects. The key issue is the surveillance role of the outside observer, also produced as such in discursive relation to the object. At stake in this view of genocide law as epistemology is the capacity to re imagine law in order to help us make hard choices about how, whether, and when to intervene in events that may be characterized as genocide
Luhmann Reconsidered: Steps Towards an Empirical Research Programme in the Sociology of Communication?
Although Luhmann formulated with modesty and precaution, for example in Die
Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft (1990a, at pp. 412f.), that his theory claims to
be a universal one because it is self-referential, the "operational closure"
that follows from this assumption easily generates a problem for empirical
research. Can a theory which considers society--and science as one of its
subsystems--operationally closed, nevertheless contribute to the project of
Enlightenment which Popper (1945) so vigorously identified as the driver of an
open society? How can a theory which proclaims itself to be circular and
universal nevertheless claim to celebrate "the triumph of the Enlightenment"
Luhmann, (1990a, at p. 548)? Is the lack of an empirical program of research
building on Luhmann's theory fortuitous or does it indicate that this theory
should be considered as a philosophy rather than a heuristic for the
explanation of operations in social systems
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