Social Immune Mechanisms: Luhmann and Potentialization Technologies

Contemporary discourses of management are full of encouragements to ‘expect the unexpected’ and to celebrate ‘the future of the future’. Many new public managerial technologies of change – such as steering Labs, future games, and managerial performance arts - promise the co- creative ‘potentialisation’ of employees, citizens and organisations. This paper approaches such potentialisation technologies as immune mechanisms which serve to protect the social system from itself. From a perspective inspired by autopoietic systems theory, potentialisation technologies provide autoimmunity by problematising institutional structures and providing ‘anti-structural’ space-times to facilitate transformation. There is a price to pay for this immune function, however, since these immune mechanisms cannot discriminate between productive and unproductive structures. By dissolving the certainty of the expectations that underlie the connectivity of diverse organisational operations, they risk harming the welfare systems that host them

The emotional organization and the problem of authenticity: The romantic, the pedagogic, the therapeutic and the ludic as liminal media of transition

Max Weber excluded the phenomenon of emotions from the idea of rational bureaucracy. Modern European organizational theories are on the other hand almost obsessed by emotions and especially affect. Emotion reentered organizational theory around the limited topic of ‘emotional labor’, but today passion is generally praised as a driver in successful organizations. An important element here is the demand upon passionate employees to install the organization as their significant other. To the extent that they rely on this new concept of themselves and their employees, organizations become dependent upon the authenticity of the ‘self-enrolment’ expected of each employee. In the discursive field of organization we therefore see a number of new communicative media which centre upon emotion and upon helping the organization to attribute authenticity and inauthenticity to employees. This paper also makes the case that these media are liminal in nature, and extend beyond the use of discursive symbolism in a Sisyphian effort to reach the authentic emotional ‘heart’ of each employee

Hvem er Yum-Yum? Tegneseriestaten i svøb

Artiklen analyserer kampagnen: ”Leg dig sund”, som er tilrettelagt af Fødevarestyrelsen og Sundhedsstyrelsen. ”Leg dig sund” retter sig mod især udsatte familier og deres vilje, viden og handlekapacitet til at leve sundt. Centrum i artiklen er kampagnens kobling til leg. Hvordan kan det være, at leg står så centralt i kampagnen? Hvad har leg og kampagne med hinanden at gøre? Hvad har sundhed og leg med hinanden at gøre? Et centralt træk ved kampagnen er, at den på én gang vil og ikke vil være en kampagne, på én gang vil og ikke vil være styring. Det hænger sammen med, at den iagttager modstand blandt de udsatte familier både i forhold til styring og i forhold til sundhedsfremme. Samtidigt vil man ikke anerkende familierne som modstandere. Man vil hellere gå uden om modstanden i en erkendelse af, at sundhedsfremme virker bedst, når den ikke ligner en sådan, og styring styrer mest, når den ikke er tilrettelagt som styring. Leg ses her som et alternativ. Artiklen ender i en diskussion af hvilken stat, der kommer til syne i en sådan praksis. Måske er det en tegneseriestat? Det er en stat, der ikke sætter grænser for sig selv overfor borgeren, for hvorfor skulle man beskytte borgerne mod leg? ENGELSK ABSTRACT: Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen: Who is Yum-Yum? The Cartoon State in the Making This article analyzes the campaign “Play Yourself Healthy”. The campaign is organized by the Danish Food Agency and the Danish Health Agency and focuses on socially “weak” families in an attempt to influence their will, knowledge and capacity to act in order to live healthy lives. The article concentrates on the link between campaigning and playing. How has play become so important to the campaign? What are the connections between playing and developing campaigns? What are the connections between health and play? The campaign wants to be both a campaign and not a campaign, both steering and not steering. This is because of the resistance among the target families to steering and health promotion. No one wants to identify the families as opponents, however, so the authorities work around their resistance by presuming that health promotion works best if it does not look like promotion, and that steering works best when it is not arranged as such. Play is seen here as an alternative, and the article hopes to foster discussion about the form of the state that emerges in the campaign practices. It offers the hypothesis that the “new state” does not limit itself in the means it uses to govern citizens. After all, why should it protect citizens against playing? Key words: Steering, campaigning, health promotion, resistance, media, play