Actions, Communications and Social Systems

 

The normative nature of the social

My writing aims at the development of a conceptual framework for the description of social entities like schools, families, nation-states, corporations, transnational regimes, et cetera as normative endeavours. The explicit recognition of the normative character of the social world is helpful for assessment, criticism, and design of social structures.

Basic concepts like action, praxis, acting together, communication, social system and social structure should enable social scientists to produce descriptions of social phenomena that are helpful for our judgements and actions. To do so, the concepts should express the normative nature of the social.

Descriptions and normative undertakings are intricately interrelated. Descriptions are involved in collective actions that produce the social world. Collective actions are normative undertakings; they strive to realize a state of the world – also in the case of playing a game of football – that would not exist without these actions. Descriptions of a piece of leather as a football, of grass as a playing field, and of human beings as football players are parts of the collective action of playing football. They are oriented by the normative perspectives that are inherent in these actions.

In sociology, the normative nature of social phenomena has to a large degree got lost. Social reality is mainly depicted as a matter of laws, forgetting about intentions and projects. In philosophy, on the other hand, normativity is often emphasized, but dealt with very generally, without a well-developed set of concepts necessary for an understanding of the diverse social forms that solicit our actions.

The conceptual framework I look for should, in the end, enable an explanation of the production of (modern) social systems and structures as matters of cooperating actions of humans who inevitably embody collective and individual normative orientations. Important concepts are “human being”, “intention”, “action”, “collective action”, “communication”, “realization”, and “social system”. These concepts should provide the possibility of an explanation for all kinds of social systems and structures; for face-to-face interactions like families, for nation states, and for world-wide networks like international and transnational regimes. Explicit attention for the normative character of the social world is basic for  assessment and design of social structures.

I have been working on the indicated subject-matter for many years now, with different thematic emphasis. From hindsight I distinguish four central themes: a) Foundations of a theory of social systems; b) Organizations and society; c) Production of social entities; d) Rules of freedom in transnational regulation. I will present the main lines of the themes below. Further on they will be dealt with in more detail, with references to relevant publications.

 

A. Foundations of a theory of social systems

This is an attempt to understand the social world with help of Luhmann’s theory of social systems. Luhmann’s theory describes the production of bounded social entities as a matter of interrelated communications. It emphasizes their contingency and autonomy. Social systems are characterized as peculiar and autonomous entities alongside psychic and organic systems. In systems theory, normativity is interpreted as a matter of sticking to rules despite the fact that these rules could be changed. Normativity is thus seen as a – non-rational – lack of attention for the basically contingent character of norms and goals. In this sense, the theory is blind for the pervasive normativity of all social phenomena.

I attempted to infuse the theory of social systems with normativity mainly through three moves.

First, I tried to undo the decoupling and juxtaposition of social, psychic, and organic systems that is typical for this theory.

Second, and related to this, I tried to conceptualize communications as consisting of actions, which are in turn made up of psychic and organic operations.

In the third place, I revised Luhmann’s theory of distinctions which overemphasises contingency, ends up in relativism about meaning-giving and valuation, and implies wrongly that the closure of a social system can be identified with the use of a particular distinction.

Texts with regard to the general theory of social systems and its revisions can be found in thematic section A: “Foundations of a theory of social systems”.

 

B. Organization and society

The general theory of social systems gives specific possibilities to understand organizations as parts of society. I tried to understand them as parts of functionally specialized societal subsystems like economy, education, science or politics. Organizations build the social context par excellence in which actions and communications are systematically directed at solving generalized problems of society, like scarcity in the economy, or production of reliable knowledge in science. My articles show, among others, that organizations are important for the realization of functional differentiation in modern societies.

Against Luhmann’s systems theory, my descriptions, first, demonstrate that although they are functionally specialized, organizations never use only one, but always a whole lot of distinctions, of which one is dominant.

Second, they clarify that the problem-orientation of each of the societal subsystems actually is an orientation on a general value. Organizations apparently have to deal with the problem of finding an equilibrium between a plurality of values, problems, and distinctions.

Finally, my reflections underline that organizations must be understood with the concept of action. Organizations cannot be reduced to communications. Their operations are for an important part actions that produce objects and services.

These points are elaborated in the articles enlisted in section B: “Organization and society”.

 

C. Production of social entities

From about 2005 on it became ever more clear to me that a satisfying theory of social systems would require a more fundamental break with Luhmann’s conceptual framework than the modifications I had proposed until then. This break concerns above all the notion of “intention”.

In Luhmann’s systems theory “intention” is replaced by “Sinn”, which in English would mean something like “selection of meaning”. This replacement allows him to cleanse concepts like “experience”, “action”, “understanding”, and “communication” from a reference to intentions. Without intentions we can, however, neither understand human behaviour, nor the cooperation of actions that build social systems and structures. Accepting this, however, has weighty conceptual consequences.

It demands an understanding of human directedness at the realization of states of the world without an explicit, conscious reflection. It also demands a comprehension of how human beings could possibly understand each-others intentions, and coordinate them.

An understanding of “understanding”, in turn, is only possible if the bodily nature of human beings, is taken into account. If intentions are understood in terms of  meaning and though only, their shared understanding is inconceivable. And, without shared understanding, collective intentions and collective actions cannot be conceived.

These subjects are dealt with in the articles, which can be found in section C: “Production of social entities”.

 

D. Rules of freedom in transnational regulation

General concepts like “human beings”, “(collective) intentions”, and “delimited social systems” can fruitfully be used in an attempt to produce a normatively oriented description of regulation beyond the nation-state.

My questions here aim at the possibility of realizing free and creative intentional action by means of democratic regulation in transnational regimes. These regimes develop rules and take care of their enforcement, for one (or a few) problematic issue(s) like child labour, marine stewardship, financial markets, fair trade, et cetera. Transnational regimes are authoritative, in that they use law-like forms and depend on judicial and administrative enforcement. Their democratic character cannot be derived from democratic nation-states; it depends, if it exists, on the qualities of their demos and its regulation by the regimes themselves.

I want to know whether democratic transnational regimes can accommodate different values while setting rules for the issues they regulate. Their procedures and constitutional frameworks for the admission and integration of many intentions and meanings in a complex fabric of collective action seem to open this possibility.

This train of thoughts is pursued in the articles in section D: “Rules of freedom in transnational regulation”.