Functional Differentiation

Zusammenfassung Die Rezeption des Begriffs Zivilgesellschaft erscheint in einem immer zwiespältigeren Licht. Einerseits befindet sich der Begriff in seiner Rezeption in einem sowohl quantitativen als auch normativ zugeschriebenen Höhenflug, andererseits wird im zivilgesellschaftlichen Diskurs zusehends immer mehr die in den meisten Ansätzen fehlende deskriptiv-analytische Konzeptionierung der Zivilgesellschaft und die inhaltliche Beliebigkeit des Begriffs kritisiert. In dieser Arbeit wird der Begriff der Zivilgesellschaft dreistufig auf seine Plausibilität hin untersucht werden. Dabei wird der Begriff in der Form seiner Einheit als Bezeichnung und damit hinsichtlich seiner generellen Eignung als wissenschaftlichen Terminus untersucht. Anschließend erfolgt eine Typologisierung und Analyse seiner Differenzen, also den die empirischen Phänomene und normativen Vorstellungen beschreibenden Konzeptionen, die alle auf die Einheit des Begriffs rekurrieren und dennoch different sind. Dabei wird festgestellt werden, dass sich weder der Begriff der Zivilgesellschaft als wissenschaftlicher Terminus in einem deskriptiv-analytischen Sinne eignet, noch, dass irgendeine existierende oder auch nur potentiell existierende Konzeption von Zivilgesellschaft plausibel sein kann. Daraufhin wird herausgearbeitet werden, dass Zivilgesellschaft seine semantische Prominenz seiner Funktion als Desiderat der bisherigen paradigmatischen Beschreibung politischer Funktion verdankt, die es bisher unmöglich machte, durch funktionale Differenzierung bestimmte empirische Phänomene dem politischen System zuzuschreiben, weshalb der Bedarf nach einem Desiderat entstand und dieses in Form der Zivilgesellschaft gefunden wurde. Durch eine Umstellung der Beschreibung der Funktion des Politischen von kollektiven Entscheidungen hin zu geräuschloser kommunikativer Legitimation kann funktionale Differenzierung greifen und es wird möglich, sich des Desiderats zu entledigen. Schlüsselwörter:

The emergence of modern societies is an evolutionary puzzle.
Homo sapiens is the only animal species capable of cooperating in
large-scale societies consisting of genetically unrelated individuals.
From a biological point of view, this feature leads to enormous ques-,
tions. Social scientists typically assume that human life is lived in largescale
societies as a result of cultural, social and institutional history. In
this perspective, social institutions such as law, economy and religion,
enhance cooperation to higher levels. Gene-culture coevolutionary
theories have studied this issue in an integrated framework that accounts
for social and biological theories of cooperation. These theoretical
approaches have provided an account of the emergence of human
institutions with reference to a coevolutionary background in which
specific innate psychological features of the human mind enable the
evolution of social institutions that impose social pressures requiring
the evolution of a complex moral psychology that enables life in a social
environment with institutions. However, although gene-culture coevolution
theories can explain cooperation in pre-modern societies,
they still cannot explain social life in complex societies such as contemporary
democracies, in which cooperation occurs even when individuals
do not agree about the main values of their society. Acknowledging
this fact raises the question as to how it has been possible-from a biological
perspective-that people cooperate in large-scale societies with
individuals with whom they are not genetically related and with whom
they may not even share values and symbolic structures of mutual self-understanding. Following Edward 0. Wilson, in hoping to achieve
consilience between the natural sciences and humanities, this paper argues
that the cooperation level required to drive the evolution of complex
societies is possible as a result of the emergence of one particular
institutional sociocultural framework: constitutionalism. In this sense,
this paper is an attempt to integrate sociology, biology and legal theory
in its understanding of constitutionalism as an evolutionary adaptation
to specific historical and sociological circumstances that demanded the
emergence of institutions to accommodate diversity, pluralism and
complexity.

This work tries to explain how the rise of black markets in North Korea, also known as Jangmadang, has been possible. For this purpose, we are observing from the perspective of the general social system theory. Also, we try to establish a bridge with some of Friedrich Hayek’s observations on how competition works. By this conceptual construction, we will be
able to understand how black markets have stabilized as an evolutionary achievement, in spite of an over-regulated environment. In this sense, we observe how North Korean entrepreneurs took advantage of some legal permissions, and how another pay bribes in order to trade. This situation has improved North Korean citizens’ lives, as long as they don’t starve, and today they have access to foreign goods. However, North Korea remains poor, and is far from being a Western capitalist economy, just as South Korea.

Dieser Artikel gibt einen Überblick über das Verhältnis von Organisation und funktionaler Differenzierung in der Systemtheorie Niklas Luhmanns. Ausgehend von der These, dass Organisation und funktionale Differenzierung sich gegenseitig bedingen, wird das Verhältnis von Organisations- und Funktionssystemsseite betrachtet und gezeigt, inwiefern ein Typus sozialer Systeme Voraussetzung für den anderen Tpyus ist. Dann wird auf eine Unentschiedenheit in der Systemtheorie hingewiesen, die die Möglichkeit der Zuweisung von Organisationen zu Funktionssystemen betrifft. Ich argumentiere, dass Organisationen auf der Ebene ihrer Autopoiesis nicht einzelnen Funktionssystemen zugeordnet werden können, komme aber zum Schluss, dass dies auf der Ebene der Beobachtung unproblematisch ist.

A sharp problem focus sharpens the problem. Sustainably ongrowing bodies of text on degrowth are not the key to post-growth scenarios because evocations of the limits of growth reinforce rather than transcend the economic principle, which is in the observation of scarcity. We therefore focus on alternative forms of growth rather than alternatives to growth. Our form-theoretical analysis of growth dismoralizes growth and disembeds it from the economic medium in which it is preferably drawn. We finally suggest that the key to a post-growth society is in a regrowth of interest in growth in so-far neglected non-economic function systems.

Much of Randolf S. David’s work in the past decade has focused on the problems caused by what he calls the Philippines’ transition to modernity. Using Niklas Luhmann’s concept of modernity as the primacy of functional differentiation, David characterized Philippine society as a society in transition from a pre-modern hierarchical form to a modern one. I critique David’s use of Luhmann’s theory of modernity in assessing the Philippine situation. Luhmann observed the primacy of functional differentiation in conditions of modernity at the world-society level. This does not preclude segmented and stratified forms of differentiation at the level of societal subsystems and institutions, which was the level at which David performed much of his analysis. I argue that the institutional dysfunctions and the high levels of inequality that David characterized as problems of transition are properly problems of modernity, not of a transition to modernity, in a Luhmannian systems analysis.

The remarkable feature of the nonprofit sector is its astonishing diversity. This feature gets short shrift in the traditional market or governmental failure theories of the nonprofit sector. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's concept of functional differentiation, we demonstrate that these theories are implicitly economy-and politics-biased. In seeking to overcome these biases, we show that nonprofits and NGOs are better understood as those varieties of organizations whose primary focus is on function systems other than the economy and politics. We summarize this argument in the concept of organizational multifunctionality which turns out to be likewise applicable to the for-profit sector.

This article is the prototype of a virus that recodes economy biased decision programs of capitalist organisations. To bypass the notorious firewalls of capitalism we developed a program that works as anti-capitalist malware program without being one. This is achieved by changing the programming language from moral code to functional differentiation. If executed, our program: a) decodes growth as both economic and non-economic form; b) installs a multifunctional subroutine that enables organisations to modulate the frequencies with which they code decisions in both economic and non-economic media. The more decisions coded in non-economic media, the less important the economy, and the more alternatives to anti-/capitalist visions of de-/growth emerge.

A principios de los años noventa, el revolucionario y millonario proyecto de investigación sobre el genoma humano atrajo miradas de todo el mundo. Su ambicioso objetivo era conocer la secuencia completa del ADN de los seres humanos y se coronó con un rotundo éxito en 2003, dos años antes de su programada finalización, con un mapa completo del genoma humano. En el ínterin despertó un amplio debate entre científicos e intelectuales acerca de las implicancias de este descubrimiento. Se trataba especialmente de las consecuencias éticas de estas investigaciones.

Sin embargo, al final el derecho solo puede poner en orden al mundo como decisión, como una marca en el vacío que divide al mundo en dos: entre quien tiene el derecho y quién no. Orden para el derecho no es unidad ni restablecimiento de equilibrio, sino distinción.

Catástrofe y moral en Chile. El pasado día 27 de febrero la zona centro sur de Chile se sacudió debido a un terremoto de 8,8 grados Richter. Las consecuencias de éste y del posterior maremoto han sido ya ampliamente difundidas. La muerte, el dolor y la angustia asolaron en gran parte de Chile. En medio de la tragedia algunos actos de vandalismo y saqueo, los cuales atraen la atención de los medios y su público.

In this article, we draw on theories of social differentiation to show that functional differentiation is not about the division of work and organization, but rather about a multiplication of horizons for decision-making. We argue that a systematic management of functional differentiation makes organizations smarter and more flexible. We corroborate this claim by demonstrations of how a functional approach to functional differentiation facilitates the design of new or the further development of well-established management tools and research agendas in fields such as entrepreneurship, strategy, and human resource management.

While the majority of market interventions is concerned with market interventions that are good for particular market participants, this article is interested in interventions that are good for markets. We draw on observations of historical markets as presented by Hamilton Grierson and Max Weber to rediscover markets as forms of communication that systematically transcend the ambitions and influence of the individual market participants. We show that this non-possessive concept of markets cancels established definitions of market failure and corresponding justifications of market interventions. We then imagine market intervention strategies that account for rather than problematize the double-contingent nature of markets and outline systemic intervention strategies that emerge if we observe markets in the medium of the health system rather than in the medium of the economy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7P0imKejmA

The link leads to my video review of Vom traditionellen China zum modernen Taiwan: Die Entwicklung funktionaler Differenzierung am Beispiel des politischen Systems und des Religionssystems by Taiwanese sociologist Tang Chih-Chieh. This work has been overlooked, because it was written in German and covers a daunting 800 pages. Yet it’s a highly ambitious, insightful work with great implications for the study of Chinese and Taiwanese history and democratization in East China. I review this work because of its scholarly significance and the degree to which it has nonetheless been overlooked in the international scholarship. This had to be in the form of a video review, because journals typically only review new books and Tang’s book (published in 2004) is already relatively old.

My video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7P0imKejmA