Special Luhmann Conference 2022 Issue of Systemic Practice and Action Research (Vol. 37 No. 3) on
Scientific communication. Observed with social systems theory
Edited by Steffen Roth, Kresimir Zazar, Lars Clausen, and Tilia Stingl de Vasconcelos Guedes
Introduction
Steffen Roth, Kresimir Zazar, Tilia Stingl de Vasconcelos Guedes, and Lars Clausen: Scientific communication observed with social systems theory. An introduction and outlook to pure science for society
Abstract: In this article, we introduce the reader to a social systems-theoretical concept of science, with particular emphasis on the role of theorising within a functionally differentiated society. Six cases are presented that demonstrate how social systems theory serves as both theory and method, thereby offering an insightful super-theoretical framework relevant to both conceptual and empirical studies. We conclude that social systems theory facilitates the pursuit of science for science’s sake by effectively challenging persistent self-confusions of society with politics or any other subsystem of society. As a result, the artificial distinction between science for the sake of science and science for the sake of society is overcome, and science for the sake of society simply represents a return of science to its own function.
Contributions
Steffen Roth: Truth tables, true distinctions. Paradoxes of the source code of science
Abstract: On the occasion of a growing popularity of paradox theory in management and organisation research, this article provides an introduction to the paradox of true distinctions, reports on its relevance to theory building, and presents a strategy to contain the paradox without resolving it. To this end, I draw on works by George Spencer Brown and Niklas Luhmann to contextualize theory within the paradox of observation in general and the paradox of scientific observation in particular. A special case of the paradox of scientific communication, paradox theory is then redefined as a scientific programme fascinated with the paradoxical nature of the basic operation of science. I conclude that further development work on the “source code” of science will provide “critical updates” on the opportunities and limits to metatheoretical extensions of theories of management, organisation, and society, including their digital transformation.
Abstract: A critical issue in the study of scientific communication from a systems theoretical perspective is its role in multiple intersystem relationships. During COVID-19, politics has adopted scientific findings to inform political decisions. However, science has in response actively coordinated its operations for providing desired stimuli to politics. Luhmann identified advice as a form of structural coupling that links political and scientific systems. Advice is not a monolithic intervention by which one side acts on the other but is rather an interface that enables the two systems to relate through distancing. In this article, I empirically illustrate how the structural coupling of the political system and scientific system through advice manifests itself in an examination of the roles that various organizations (expert meeting and cluster task forces) have played in Japan’s response to COVID-19. Through this analysis, I provide a theoretical insight regarding these organizations and a more detailed case analysis of the transformation of certain organizations to re-describe the system theoretical insights of advice in the form of scientific communication between politics and science.
Egon B. Noe and Hugo F. Alrøe: Research Centers, Scientific Freedom, and the Jester’s Paradox
Abstract: The key norm of good science is research integrity, which includes the freedom to inquire as an independent, self-organising system, and the responsibility to identify, frame, and engage in the problems of society, in a scientific manner. This paper investigates the challenges to scientific integrity experienced by university research centres. Research centres are organised around specific problematic fields in society and are expected to have specific societal impacts. Therefore, they are born with the paradox of being restricted in terms of scientific freedom yet required to meet science standards. As an example, we analyse the Danish Centre for Rural Research (CLF) which, like many other institutions of science and research centres, has become increasingly dependent on various external funding over the past decades. In social systems theoretical terms, research centres are hybrid organisations that operate simultaneously in the function systems of science, politics, and economy. The question is whether it is possible for research centres to uphold the requisite research integrity to provide society with truthful and critical knowledge – i.e. to uphold the necessary autopoiesis of the science function system, operating in the medium of truth – and at the same time be able to navigate in the structures of power that the centre is faced with, in terms of funding, outside control, and expectations of expectations. The medieval court jester, who was able to speak unwelcome truths to the all-mighty king without getting his head cut off, was a solution to this kind of paradox. The question is how we can handle this paradox in contemporary sciences, increasingly depending on external funding.
Margit Neisig: The Role of Management Science in Forming Next Era Semantics
Abstract: The author has previously in a social system theoretical perspective outlined a position for engaged scholarship in bridging the gulf between theorizing and practice. Partaking as “midwives” for shared semantics in a polycentric network was analyzed as one role for engaged scholars to assist. This paper, however, argues that for a shared semantic reservoir for “next era” leadership and management to form, one more layer of reflection is needed: how to manage “backwards” from the future. The paper also addresses geographic inclusion/exclusion, which seems to be reinforced as digitalization and abstract knowledge are gaining ground, even though bits and abstract knowledge should easily be detached from spatial limitations. Research programs targeting “grand challenges” and “grand solutions” is defined by megaprojects defined and financed by large foundations or other large-scale actors, and well-connected international research centers and research networks are needed to influence this agenda-setting. The paper argues that forming regional polycentric networks (including scientific research scholars) may to a greater extend bridge the global agendas with local and regional issues to not be excluded in a transition process.
Anahit Hakobyan: Communicating Scientific Knowledge as News on Social Media: Analyses in Frames of Luhmann’s System Theory
Abstract: Digital technology has posed a challenge to the conventional way in which scientific knowledge was disseminated and validated within the scientific system. Scientific knowledge has interfered into the mass media system through online platforms and social media networks. This tendency tremendously expanded after the Covid-19 pandemic, which challenged scientific community around the world to search for more effective ways of communicating scientific evidence. Meanwhile, recent studies show that trust towards science has globally increased since the pandemic. Moreover, it is a key driving force behind people’s attitudes and has predictable impact on their pandemic-related behavior. Despite the widespread dissemination of scientific knowledge, it is often misrepresented, oversimplified, or distorted. People trust science globally, yet scientific knowledge is disseminated through the widely-used yet least trusted medium of social media. This paper aims to analyze the interconnection between scientific and mass media systems and its effects on communicating scientific knowledge on social media. For this purpose, the logic of digital media platforms is explored, and Luhman’s system theory is viewed as an essential theoretical background for the analyses of the spread and exposure of scientific knowledge across social media. Theoretical analyses, along with secondary data analysis of recent global studies on news consumption and trust towards the media and science, are used to analyze the structural coupling of the mass media and scientific systems. The author concludes that it is essential to interconnect scientific and mass media systems, taking into account trust towards the medium, message, and source.
Lars Clausen: The systemic challenge and practice of leadership in a post-Centaurian society
Abstract: For thousands of years, humans and horse have cohabitated on the earth. From the steppes of Mongolia to the shores of Ireland and Iceland, horses gradually became an increasingly integral part of the social fabric, as they offered their services to humans in exchange for domesticated survival. In this article, we trace the equestrian iconography of power and leadership from its origins in ancient times through to modern times and identify the transitory position of contemporary management, moving into a post-centaurian age in which the complex iconographic reservoir of meanings and figures is supplanted by new forms of managerial reasoning, founded in the long legacy of the anthropocentrism of the Enlightenment. Through an explorative approach, the systems theoretical approach of Niklas Luhmann is extended to include the modus operandi of pre-modern societies with its abundance of non-human actors such as demons, gods, angels and horses. In conclusion, the article demonstrates how the widely used idea of post-heroic leadership is a severe misconception of historical concepts of heroes; rather, post-heroic deeds are in adherence with equestrian treatises of heroic leadership which promoted the demonstration of heroic excellence in the equestrian manège. As the horses and the heroes of modernity are seemingly relegated to the confinements of history books, the reservoir of equine-heroic semantics and concepts is still with us today and continues to resonate in semantic figures of power, framing the life of the post-Centaurian manager, politicians, Ukrainian soldiers and the plethora of societal realms still using the language connected to equestrian semantics.
Image credit: Günter Lierschof, Artefakt “Performance Dubrovnik 2022”-“SOZIALE MEDIEN”.
Dr. Steffen Roth 