Announcement | Multiple Publications by the Next Society Institute Featured in Lithuania’s Social Science Top 10 Assessment

The Research Council of Lithuania has included the following 13 publications authored or co-authored by members of the Next Society Institute in its official 2025 TOP 10 assessment of social science research published between 2016 and 2025. The assessment identifies publications by Lithuanian-affiliated researchers that rank among the world’s 10% most-cited articles in their respective […]

CFA | EURAM Early Career Colloquium 2027 at Wolfson College, Cambridge

18th EURAM Early Career Colloquium Distinction and Belonging: Finding Your Voice and Building Your Place in a Changing Academy Venue: Wolfson College, University of Cambridge Date: 15-17 March 2027 Are you an early career academic looking to share your research and develop collaboration opportunities in a vibrant environment of peers, senior mentors, and the EURAM top management team? […]

Release | Special Issue of IT&P on “Coding Society: Programmatic Encounters Between Information Systems and Social Theory”

Special Luhmann Conference 2025 issue of Information Technology & People on the theme of “Coding Society: Programmatic Encounters Between Information Systems and Social Theory” Click here for the issue as published on the IT&P website. Contributions Dinesh Kumar and Nidhi Suthar: Programmes as decision premises in AI-mediated organisations: a social systems theory perspective Diane Laflamme: […]

Release | From schools of business to schools of ideology? A systems-theoretical perspective on popular claims to organisational reprogramming

Abstract: Purpose: Business schools are increasingly expected to align their missions, curricula and research agendas with broader societal concerns such as sustainability, social responsibility and ethical governance. Yet debates on such repurposing often conflate organisational purpose with external performance expectations or broader societal function. This paper develops a systems-theoretical framework for analysing such claims. Design/methodology/approach: […]

Release | JBE | Multifunctional Tetralemma. Framework for the Strategic Management of Moral Trade-offs

Abstract: The issue of moral trade-offs is widely discussed in the literatures on sustainable development and stakeholder theory. Sustainability efforts often require corporate managers to balance economic, social, and environmental concerns, which frequently translate into trade-offs between legitimate stakeholder interests. We investigate how the nature of these trade-offs is illuminated by Luhmannian systems theory, particularly […]

Release | Big data insights into social macro trends: Expanding the horizon (1800-2018)

Abstract: This article examines how big data can inform and challenge established theories and future visions of society. Utilising the most recent version of the arguably largest free online corpus, the Google Books corpus (version 20200217), we replicate and enhance Roth et al.’s (2019a) systems-theoretical methodology for analysing macro social trends. Thus extending the sample […]

Release | Special issue of Current Sociology on “Guiding distinctions of social theory. Analogue guidelines or digital transformers?”

Special Luhmann Conference 2024 issue of Current Sociology on the theme of “Guiding distinctions of social theory. Analogue guidelines or digital transformers?” Click here for the issue as published on the Current Sociology website. Contributions: Editorial: Steffen Roth, Steve Watson, Harry Dahms, and Arthur Atanesyan: Guiding distinctions of social theory. Analogue guidelines or digital transformers? […]

Release | Virtual special Issue on “Guiding Distinctions of Management and Organisation Research”

Virtual special Luhmann Conference 2024 issue of Management Revue on the theme of “The Guiding Distinctions of Management and Organisation Research” Introduction Steffen Roth, Lars Clausen, Margit Neisig, and Augusto Sales: Guiding Distinctions of Management and Organisation Research. An Introduction, Management Revue, Vol. 36 No. 1, 39357. Contributions Albrecht Fritzsche: Regulation and Distinction—A Generalized Approach […]

Release | Guiding distinctions of social theory: results from two online brainstormings and one quantitative analysis of the ISA Books of the XX Century corpus

Abstract: In this paper, we report on the results of two online brainstormings that have collected over 480 and over 219 guiding distinctions of social theory, respectively. We draw on the results of these brainstormings as well as on a quantitative analysis of the Top 100 sociological groundworks as listed in the ISA Books of the XX […]