This book provides current information about the many recent contributions of social systems theory. While some sociologists feel that the systems age ended with functionalism, in reality a number of recent developments have occurred within the field. The author makes these developments accessible to sociologists and other non-systems scholars, and begins a synthesis of the burgeoning systems field and mainstream sociological theory. The analysis shows not only that important points of rapprochement exist between systems theory and sociological theory, but also that systems theory has in some cases anticipated developments needed in mainstream theory.
After providing a review of classical theory, this book carefully sketches the chief contributions of living systems theory, social entropy theory, autopoiesis, and other approaches. It shows that these approaches are without flaws of earlier functionalism, yet they retain the breadth and integrative potential needed by mainstream theorists concerned about the threat of hyperspecialization and fragmentation within sociology.
Control Systems Theory, a newly developing theoretical perspective, starts from an important insight into human behaviour: that people attempt to control the world around them as they perceive it. This book brings together for the first time the work of prominent sociologists contributing to the development of this wideranging theoretical paradigm.
In The Emerging Consensus of Social Systems Theory Bausch summarizes the works of over 30 major systemic theorists. He then goes on to show the converging areas of consensus among these out-standing thinkers. Bausch categorizes the social aspects of current systemic thinking as falling into five broadly thematic areas: designing social systems, the structure of the social world, communication, cognition and epistemology. These five areas are foundational for a theoretic and practical systemic synthesis. They were topics of contention in a historic debate between Habermas and Luhmann in the early 1970's. They continue to be contentious topics within the study of social philosophy. Since the 1970's, systemic thinking has taken great strides in the areas of mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, and sociology. This book presents a spectrum of those theoretical advances. It synthesizes what various strains of contemporary systems science have to say about social processes and assesses the quality of the resulting integrated explanations. Bausch gives a detailed study of the works of many present-day systems theorists, both in general terms, and with regard to social processes. He then creates and validates integrated representations of their thoughts with respect to his own thematic classifications. He provides a background of systemic thinking from an historical context, as well as detailed studies of developments in sociological, cognitive and evolutionary theory. This book presents a coherent, dynamic model of a self-organizing world. It proposes a creative and ethical method of decision-making and design. It makes explicit the relations between structure and process in the realms of knowledge and being. The new methodology that evolves in this book allows us to deal with enormous complexity, and to relate ideas so as to draw out previously unsuspected conclusions and syntheses. Therein lies the elegance and utility of this model.
The central topic of this book is the mathematical analysis of social systems, understood in the following rather classical way: social systems consist of social actors who interact according to specific rules of interactions; the dynamics of social systems is then the consequences of these interactions, viz., the self-organization of social systems. According to particular demands of their environment, social systems are able to behave in an adaptive manner, that is they can change their rules of interaction by certain meta rules and thus generate a meta dynamics. It is possible to model and analyse mathematically both dynamics and meta dynamics, using cellular automata and genetic algorithms. These tools allow social systems theory to be carried through as precisely as the theories of natural systems, a feat that has not previously been possible. Readership: Researchers and graduate students in the fields of theoretical sociology and social and general systems theory and other interested scientists. No specialised knowledge of mathematics and/or computer science is required.
Social systems occur in many contexts of social work. This book provides an easy-to-read introduction to systems thinking for social workers who will encounter social problems in their professional practice or academic research. It offers new insights and fresh perspectives on this familiar topic and invites creative, critical, and empathetic thinking with a systems perspective. Through introducing systems theory as a problem-oriented approach for dealing with complex interpersonal relations and social systems, this book provides a framework for studying social relations. The authors present a strand of systems theory (inspired by sociologist Niklas Luhmann) that offers innovative, surprising, and practically relevant understandings of everyday social life, inclusion/exclusion, social problems, interventions, and society in general. Systems Theory for Social Work and the Helping Professions should be considered essential reading for all social work students taking modules on sociology and social policy as well as students of nursing, medicine, counselling, and occupational health and therapy.
Germany's most prominent social thinker here sets out a contribution to sociology that aims to rework our understanding of meaning and communication. He links social theory to recent theoretical developments in scientific disciplines.
Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) was a German sociologist and system theorist who wrote on law, economics, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love. Luhmann advocated a radical constructivism and antihumanism, or "grand theory," to explain society within a universal theoretical framework. Nevertheless, despite being an iconoclast, Luhmann is viewed as a political conservative. Hans-Georg Moeller challenges this legacy, repositioning Luhmann as an explosive thinker critical of Western humanism. Moeller focuses on Luhmann's shift from philosophy to theory, which introduced new perspectives on the contemporary world. For centuries, the task of philosophy meant transforming contingency into necessity, in the sense that philosophy enabled an understanding of the necessity of everything that appeared contingent. Luhmann pursued the opposite—the transformation of necessity into contingency. Boldly breaking with the heritage of Western thought, Luhmann denied the central role of humans in social theory, particularly the possibility of autonomous agency. In this way, after Copernicus's cosmological, Darwin's biological, and Freud's psychological deconstructions of anthropocentrism, he added a sociological "fourth insult" to human vanity. A theoretical shift toward complex system-environment relations helped Luhmann "accidentally" solve one of Western philosophy's primary problems: mind-body dualism. By pulling communication into the mix, Luhmann rendered the Platonic dualist heritage obsolete. Moeller's clarity opens such formulations to general understanding and directly relates Luhmannian theory to contemporary social issues. He also captures for the first time a Luhmannian attitude toward society and life, defined through the cultivation of modesty, irony, and equanimity.
Social Interaction Systems is the culmination of a half century of work in the field of social psychology by Robert Freed Bales, a pioneer at the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University. Led by Talcott Parsons, Gordon W. Allport, Henry A. Murray, and Clyde M. Kluckhohn, the Harvard Project was intended to establish an integrative framework for social psychology, one based on the interaction process, augmented by value content analysis. Bales sees this approach as a personal involvement that goes far beyond the classical experimental approach to the study of groups. Bales developed SYMLOG, which stands for systematic multiple level observation of groups. The SYMLOG Consulting Group approach was worldwide as well as interactive. It created a data bank that made possible a search for general laws of human interaction far beyond anything thus far known. In his daring search for universal features, Bales redefines the fundamental boundaries of the field, and in so doing establishes criteria for the behavior and values of leaders and followers. Bales offers a new "field theory," an appreciation of the multiple contexts in which people live. Bales does not aim to eradicate differences, but to understand them. In this sense, the values inherent in any interaction situation permit the psychologist to appreciate the sources of polarization as they actually exist: between conservative and liberal, individualistic and authoritarian, libertarian and communitarian. Bales repeatedly emphasizes that the mental processes of individuals and their social interactions take place in systematic contexts which can be measured. Hence they permit explanation and prediction of behavior in a more exact way than in past traditions. Bales has offered a pioneering work that has the potential to move us into a new theoretical epoch no less than a new century. His work holds out the promise of synthesis and support for psychologists, sociologists, and all who work with groups and organizations of all kinds.
