Texts in this section concentrate on the relationships between functionally specialized subsystems of society, like politics, law, economy, education and labour relations, and organizations.

Organizations are nowadays for the main part organizations of differentiated societal subsystems. They are dominantly oriented at contributing to solutions for the focal problem of one subsystem. In other words, they are functionally specialized. Political parties for example are organizations dealing with the production of collective decisions, which is the problem of the political system; hospitals are fighting the problem of illness in the system of health care. The orientation on a problem is realized through the use of function-specific distinctions; law for example uses, legal/non-legal, health care, illness/health.

Luhmann investigates the organizational mechanisms that realize the orientations of organizations on specific societal functions. He points especially at the use of system-specific operations – communications of explicit decisions – as the specific form of communications in the case of organizations. Organizations have, however, a whole lot of further characteristics, like membership-rules, explicit programs, and incentive-structures, that especially enable a continuous and flexible orientation of their actions and communications regarding solutions for problems of modern societies. The content of their societal problem orientation derives from the continuous use of function-specific distinctions.

I clarify that the problem-orientation of each of the societal subsystems actually is an orientation on a general value; something being a problem means that a valued state of affairs should be realized. The distinction legal/non-legal is for example used in the context of realizing a state of affairs in which more or less justified expectations of actions are warranted, a state that is preferred to the one in which there are no assurances for the contexts of actions. Organizations apparently have to deal with the problem of finding an equilibrium between a plurality of values, problems, and distinctions. They are confronted with problems of making choices in normatively charged situations.
Luhmann’s theory inhabits a tension between a tendency to focus all of its attention on the specific distinctions that are responsible for the functional orientation of societal subsystems and the inevitable recognition of the existence of a vast plurality of distinctions in any organization. He tends to forget about this last plurality. Consequently, he neglects the practical problem of organizations having to think about the relationship of these distinctions, and more important still, the relationship between the involved diverse perspectives and values of its members and stakeholders. There is no place in his theory for practical reasoning and discussion that are necessary for the recognition of the plurality of perspectives and valuations, and for solving the tensions that exist between them.

Another major problem in Luhmann’s theory of organizations that gets attention in my texts concerns its exclusive attention for communications and the concomitant reduction of action to an ascription of communications to persons. My reflections underline that organizations cannot be understood without the concept of action. The operations organizations consist of are for an important part actions that produce objects and services. They cannot be reduced to communications.

The necessity to think about organisations in terms of action is further confirmed by the analysis of the system of labour relations, which makes clear that the use of organic and psychic systems in organizations is a matter of actions that are potentially harmful for human beings and are therefore regulated in a coherent set of rules for labour conditions.