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... this case there is no therapist. This syndrome has become established in the institutions which are our society. What is its cause? We may say here that it is due partly to the fact that everyone has taken sides: political polarization. Hence every act will be interpreted as apolitical act regardless of how straightforwardly it is meant.
Add to this the defensive atmosphere characteristic of a polarized atmosphere, where both blacks and whites believe that "whoever is not for us is against us. " The result is the social prison of double-bind. I cannot dig deeper here to ask for the cause, in turn, of this polarization, except to mention that Hegel and the American politics agree that confrontation - however it oversimplifies the facts - is the price of historical evolution. Double-binds frequently occur with another symptom of a pathological institution. We may call this symptom the "opposite results syndrome. " We often find that mission-oriented institutions wind up causing results the opposite of their mission. This familiar phenomenon is easy enough to spot, but its pervasiveness has not yet been fully acknowledged. 4 A fundamental value of our society is the healing and care of the sick. But medical and nursing programs virtually require their student practitioners to develop a certain coldness toward patients.
Why? first, because the institutionalization of care requires efficiency. Second, competition for admission to medical school is high, tending by "natural selection" to ensure that the tough gain admission. And again, Edwards example brightly shows that, regardless of parents and even his own will, Edward did the opposite to what was suggested in his treatment. It was one of Gregory Bateson greatest contributions to show that human or animal communication systems are deeply dependent on paralinguistic or para logical settings. The concept of code-duality was meant as a tool for conceptualizing this theme as a general theme for evolution.
The perpetual accumulation of new mutations in the genomes of the species of this world is of course necessary for the evolutionary process to proceed, but code-duality points to the necessity for a semiotic contextualizing of the process. 5 Luhmann redefined social systems as being realized in a domain of 'communications'. In other words, the constituent elements of the social system are communications. The necessary conditions for autopoiesis are met in terms of such communications. This has the advantage of describing the system in terms of its operational characteristics, independent from the specific participants in that system at any given time. In our case, we can consider Edward-parents relations in terms of their socio-cultural circumstances. According to Luhmann's perception of the society, we can consider the chosen system as technically described objects, which behave according to their behavioral standards and values, at the same time, excluding human factor. (1).
Luhmann's approach appears radical in the sense that it treats social systems solely in terms of 'communications', making the human participants peripheral components at most. His ideas are most persuasive in his specific application of the principles to the field of law, where highly-structured 'communications' are more easily considered as a network unto themselves than is the case for most enterprises. Luhmann's approach resembles conventional organizational studies in its focus on the enterprise as the primary object of concern. However, his ideas are problematical with respect to autopoietic theory itself. For example, a system can be considered autopoietic to the extent it realizes the necessary relations in a given space. Luhmann has not provided a comprehensive definition of the space in which his 'communications' are manifested.
The most common informal reaction to Luhmann's approach is apprehension about his having effectively filtered humans out of his model. The formal aspects of autopoietic theory (organization, autopoiesis) dominate Luhmannian descriptions focusing on the enterprises as unit wholes. Luhmann's concentration on 'communications' masks the fact that his analysis ignores Maturana's account of languaging and excludes the individual interactions from consideration. Many of the theoretical problems of Luhmann's approach could be avoided by switching from a claim of enterprise autopoiesis to a claim of autonomy. Varela (1979) allows for this approach, and his discussion provides the foundation for its pursuit.
Nonetheless, analysts committed to a sys-referential perspective continue to argue for the stricter case of autopoiesis. As will be discussed below, there have been few attempts to demonstrate that a social system exhibits autopoiesis, and these attempts have not been persuasive. Given the popularity of Luhmann and his work, plus the conventional social / management science perspective of the 'enterprise' as a unit object, we should expect interest in a sys-referential approach to persist. (4). Luhmann's interpretation of social systems as autopoietic in and of themselves has engendered much theoretical debate, but little in the way of concrete analyses. Three social systems broadly defined have been the objects of such analysis. In Veronica Decides to Die by Paulo Koelyo, we can see Hermeneutic theory at work, where Edward becomes the victim of the influence of his parents authority.
Being politics in life, they execute the same policy inside their family, lacking to understand the need for simple human relations like father and son, mother and son, parents and son. Instead, they represent a social system or family institution framed by rules and executing cooperation with another institution, which their son represents. Luhmann would see this situation in such a perspective. As any social system, it has to produce the results in this form or another, like intellectual achievements. But following the explanation of "opposite results syndrome", Edwards situation appears to be directly opposite. Everything that comes after is the matter of Bateson's theory described above.
In the sense of political polarization, nominalistic and hermeneutic approaches are quite similar. (2). Zeleny and Hufford (1992) pursue a Luhmannian approach (treating social systems as autopoietic) via the radical claim that autopoietic systems are necessarily social. They cite the family as the paradigmatic social system exhibiting autopoiesis, and argue that families exhibit the required attributes of self-delineation and maintenance of a boundary and self- (re) production of constituent components as delineated by Varela (1974). Yet the enormous formalism of the theory hampers an easy access by the outsider. That makes it difficult to devise a strategy for a dialogue between Luhmann and IR. It is appropriate to look at Luhmann's social theory by concentrating on one particular concept crucial for IR.
Power becomes the point, since it is a concept considered fundamental in IR or classical political science more so than for Luhmann and yet still allows a manageable access to some of the potentials and limits of his social theory for IR theories. Hence, the following will try to unravel the content Luhmann gives to 'power' in his theory by linking it up with some conceptual discussions in IR. 6 It is necessarily different, and perhaps inferior, to a purely hermeneutic re-reading of Luhmann in his own terms. The choice of Luhmann for analyzing power is interesting as he is perhaps the one social theorist who most radically reacted against the tautological use of power and its ubiquity. Luhmann is the one holiest who cuts power down like individualists. Hence, the following analysis will be done in two steps. First, my argument will be to demonstrate the way Luhmann's social theory deliberately underplays the phenomenon of power.
This will be shown by analyzing the shifts in Luhmann's general theory which do not leave the concept of power untouched. Indeed, there are three concepts of power in Luhmann. The last reserves a very limited place to power. (5). Luhmann defines power as a medium of communication which, in his theoretical shift towards autopoiesis, is increasingly tied to one and only one social system, namely politics. Second, he moves away from classical stratification theories in sociology by levelling all social systems: the political system is removed from its prior place.
None of these moves alone would diminish the importance of power, only both together. To the contrary, keeping only one of the two theoretical decisions would potentially increase the role of power in social theory. Luhmann bases his understanding of power mainly on the social exchange and community power literature. This is interesting, since this type of literature has an individualist understanding of social interaction and is therefore meta-theoretically incompatible with Luhmann's functionalist approach. The basic inspiration of this literature is Max Weber's definition of power as getting somebody else to do something against his or her will. As a result, this literature defines power as a causal concept, but not of the earlier mechanic version.
Luhmann takes will or preferences seriously and hence this conceptualization of power needs to refer to both individual and interactive preference rankings and foregone alternatives. Luhmann would insist that power is a relational, not to be confused with a relative, concept. In other words, power does not reside in capabilities or resources which are just this: re-sources but in the effect those can have in the relationship between actors. Power is, finally, a counterfactual concept, since it means that action has been affected which would have been different otherwise. This literature work had been written as an open attack against elitist approaches, insisting on the empirical verifiability of power claims, something a functionalist approach would have difficulties to meet. Therefore, empirical studies had to be carried out in clearly delineating the issue areas where power would obtain analyses which took the form of decision-making studies. 7 Bibliography: Johnson, James and Dana R.
Villa. "Public Sphere, Postmodernism and Polemic. " American Political Science Review, June 1994, n. 2. pp. 237 - 244. Meyrowitz, Joshua. No Sense of Place.
Oxford: Oxford U. Press. 1985. Page G. Family and Culture. London: Tavistock. 1987. Peters, J.
D. Historical Tensions in the Concept of Public Opinion. New York: Guilford Press. 1995. pp. 3 - 32. Ridden, John. The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming.
New York: Oxford University Press. 1989. Varela L. "Habermas, History, and Critical Theory. " In Habermas and the Public Sphere, Craig Calhoun, Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press. 1992. p. 216 - 249. Zeleny F. , and Hufford R. Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
Media, Culture, and Society, 1992. pp. 8 - 21. Outline 1. Introduction: Luhmann theory. Power as the basic concept of Luhmann's approach. Luhmann to be discovered in IR 2.
Written work analysis: Veronica Decides to Die by Paulo Koelyo Basic concepts: identifying the phenomenon The tension in the phenomenon is correlated with self-reproduction of society Bateson's theory and its application to the case Bateson's explication of the double-bind "Opposite results syndrome" 3. Luhmann social systems Conventional organizational studies Theoretical problems of Luhmann's approach Social system exhibiting autopoiesis Hermeneutic re-reading of Luhmann in his own terms.
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Research essay sample on Double Bind Social Theory
