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Journal ArticleDOI

Law as a Social System

01 Jan 2006-Modern Law Review (Blackwell Publishing Ltd)-Vol. 69, Iss: 1, pp 123-129
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a method to solve the problem of homonymity of homophily in the context of homomorphic data, and no abstracts are available.
Abstract: No abstract available.
Citations
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Journal Article
TL;DR: In this paper, a more simplistic conceptualization of autopoiesis is proposed, and guidelines for a new foundation in this area are given. But there are often contradictions in the very essence of the theory which are outlined in this article.
Abstract: Autopoietic theory, a theory of complex, non- linear, autonomous and especially living systems, found its way from biology, through the social sciences to organization theory and information systems. It enjoys major attention from scientific audience in lots of different disciplines. Still there hasn't been enough effort to establish a common foundation for a new theory. There are often contradictions in the very essence of the theory which are outlined in this article. By using a more simplistic conceptualization of autopoiesis, we are trying to give guidelines for a new foundation in this area.

16 citations


Additional excerpts

  • ...(Luhmann 1989, p. 145)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the potential and limits of quantitative approaches to labour law research are explored, and the methods used to construct and validate indicators of labour regulation and those used in the econometric analysis of the effects of labour law rules on employment, productivity and inequality.
Abstract: This article considers the potential and limits of quantitative approaches to labour law research. It explores the methods used to construct and validate indicators of labour regulation (‘leximetrics’) and those used in the econometric analysis of the effects of labour law rules on employment, productivity and inequality. It is argued that while there is a risk of the misuse and misappropriation of legal indicators, they can provide new evidence on the nature and effects of labour law rules, and thereby contribute to labour law theory as well as to the resolution of some practical issues of regulatory policy.

16 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
29 Jan 2017-parallax
TL;DR: In this article, the development and evolution of Derrida's rhetoric of contamination from his increasing deployment of epidemiological tropes (contagion, virology) from the late 1980s to his shift to immunological tropes in a number of his later works in the 1990s and 2000s.
Abstract: Threaded through Derrida’s body of work is a rhetoric of contamination, one that is intimately bound to the question of metaphor—that is, to the question of language and communication in general. In his reading of Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double in Writing and Difference (1967), Derrida notes that it is ‘metaphor that Artaud wants to destroy’. Metaphor, the manifestation of the schism between words and their referents, and an inescapable reminder of human alienation from the divine, is at the same time a force of contamination. Metaphor is a mark Derrida writes, quoting Artaud, of an ‘infection of the human which contaminates ideas that should have remained divine’. The publication of Dissemination a few years later in 1972 saw Derrida concretising the links between contamination and metaphor. There is, as Derrida points out in Dissemination, a complex feedback loop between metaphor—the ultimate figure of figurality—and contamination: ‘metaphoricity is’, he says, ‘the logic of contamination and the contamination of logic’. In this paper, I map the development and evolution of Derrida’s rhetoric of contamination from his increasing deployment of epidemiological tropes (contagion, virology) from the late 1980s to his shift to immunological tropes in a number of his later works in the 1990s and 2000s. In particular, I read Derrida’s ‘logic of autoimmunity’—a concept that has been considered emblematic of his ‘ethical’ or ‘political’ turn—as an extension of rather than a point of rupture from his rhetorical concerns, and one that is undergirded by the principle of contamination.

16 citations

Dissertation
01 Jan 2008
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explored the issue of the sustainability of marketing systems and developed an alternative logic of marketing system and a methodological basis for interpreting communicated meanings, based on complex systems thinking, and they showed that interactive meaning-creation in the system is inherently contradictory.
Abstract: The purpose of this qualitative macromarketing investigation is to explore the issue of the sustainability of marketing systems. Drawing on complex systems thinking, an alternative logic of marketing systems and a methodological basis for interpreting communicated meanings are developed. The alternative logic of marketing systems recognises the unity of a difference between a marketing system and its environment. This insight has become a cornerstone for synthesising the systeming methodology. Systeming comprises the philosophy, the model, and the method of interpreting communication-as-self-observation of marketing system agents. Data, communication by hybrid car manufacturers and consumers, were collected from netnographic sources such as corporate websites, reports posted online, weblogs, and consumer forums. The interpretation of these data was accomplished using systeming procedures, e.g. communication analysis, distinction identification, re-entry description, and logical level tracking. The systeming analysis of the hybrid car marketer and consumer communications illustrates that meaning-creation in the system is underpinned by purposeful human behaviour in reducing complexity of marketplace experience into a meaningful pattern, sustainability. Both manufacturers and consumers claim to become “sustainable” in reference to being “unsustainable” by creating self-referential differences, operating in different interaction contexts, and expanding meaning paradoxes. The interpretation shows that interactive meaning-creation in the system is inherently contradictory. Manufacturers expand (give a logical form to) contradictions through introducing hierarchical meaning structures, temporality, new functions, and communicative transvection. Consumers deal with the contradictions through enriching co-creation experiences and learning the proper continuation of specific hybrid car driving practices. The significant insight gained from this investigation is that the hybrid car marketing system is not a passive entity; it is the locus of purposefully expanding meanings. Two modes of sustainability with regard to the hybrid car marketing system can be distinguished: the content of communication that denotes enacted meanings of sustainability and the form of communication that indicates how sustainable these sustainability enactments are. The content/form distinction implies that the sustainability of the hybrid car marketing system is a matter of interactive meaning-creation between system agents. The sustainable development process, in at least a mobility domain, is driven by purposeful social interaction rather than static product attributes. This investigation is innovative because it a) offers a conceptualisation of a marketing system as a meaning flow; b) synthesises and compiles a methodology and method for interpreting communication in a marketing system; c) reveals systemic insights into the hybrid car marketing system; d) characterises the sustainability dimension of the hybrid car marketing system; e) explains a conceptual ground for reconciling the marketing system and society; f) provides a general macromarketing perspective to scrutinise recent conceptual developments in the marketing discipline; g) unifies marketing systems thinking with recent advancements in the marketing discipline, such as the servicedominant logic, and consumer culture theory; and, also, h) provides recommendations for a number of micro-managerial situations from a holistic perspective. Preface and Acknowledgements At a time when so many scholars in the world are calculating, is it not desirable that some, who can, dream? Rene Thom (1989), mathematician, the father of catastrophe theory In fact, mathematics is more philosophy than symbol manipulation (Gullberg, 1997). Similarly, the marketing field is in no less need of philosophical intellectualisation and qualitative interpretation. This thesis has actually been inspired by the ideas of logical mathematicians, e.g. Kurt Gödel, Bertrand Russell, and Douglas Hofstadter. Also, the ideas of Niklas Luhmann, the guru of complex systems thinking in sociology, have been particularly inspiring. Useful concepts have been borrowed from a cybernetics expert Heinz von Foerster, cultural anthropologist Gregory Bateson, linguist Ludvig Wittgenstein, and organisational psychologist Karl Weick. This shows that the background of this investigation is very broad and is not simply limited to marketing literature. In my opinion, this is what is required for being able to think about a marketing

16 citations


Cites background or methods from "Law as a Social System"

  • ...The alternative view, the interpretive constructivist perspective, looks at organisation as a unity of communication, interaction, and discourses (Bouchikhi, 1998; Cooren et al., 2005; CzarniawskaJoerges & Gagliardi, 2003; Daft & Weick, 1984; Luhmann, 2004; Seidl & Becker, 2006)....

    [...]

  • ...…in the next section), was applied to society (Baecker, 1999; Luhmann, 1989, 1995, 2002), economic systems (Staubmann, 1997), legal systems (Luhmann, 2004), art (Sevanen, 2001), organisations (Baecker, 2006; Seidl & Becker, 2006), public relations (Holmstrom, 2005), and environmental…...

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  • ...Therefore, the interpretive thrust of this investigation will be on intellectualising the boundaries of marketing systems, since the definition of a system cannot be complete without delineation of its boundaries (Luhmann, 2004)....

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  • ...Various forms of social systems have been discussed in the sociology literature (Luhmann, 1995, 2004; Seidl & Becker, 2006)....

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  • ...This constitutes the essence of systeming (Luhmann, 2004)....

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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the implications of the Covid-19 crisis for the theory and practice of governance and argue that the organisation of knowledge through public institutions, including the legal system, is essential for the future control of pandemics and other Anthropogenic risks.
Abstract: We consider the implications of the Covid-19 crisis for the theory and practice of governance We define ‘governance’ as the process through which, in the case of a given entity or polity, resources are allocated, decisions made and policies implemented, with a view to ensuring the effectiveness of its operations in the face of risks in its environment Core to this, we argue, is the organisation of knowledge through public institutions, including the legal system Covid-19 poses a particular type of ‘Anthropogenic’ risk, which arises when organised human activity triggers feedback effects from the natural environment As such it requires the concerted mobilisation of knowledge and a directed response from governments and international agencies In this context, neoliberal theories and practices, which emphasise the self-adjusting properties of systems of governance in response to external shocks, are going to be put to the test In states’ varied responses to Covid-19 to date, it is already possible to observe some trends One of them is the widespread mischaracterisation of the measures taken to address the epidemic at the point of its emergence in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January and February 2020 Public health measures of this kind, rather than constituting a ‘state of exception’ in which legality is set aside, are informed by practices which originated in the welfare or social states of industrialised countries, and which were successful in achieving a ‘mortality revolution’ in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Relearning this history would seem to be essential for the future control of pandemics and other Anthropogenic risks

16 citations

References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Ralf Michaels1
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss how legal pluralism engages with legal globalization and how legal globalization utilizes legal plurality, and provide an outlook on the future of global legal plurality as theory and practice.
Abstract: Some challenges of legal globalization closely resemble those formulated earlier for legal pluralism: the irreducible plurality of legal orders, the coexistence of domestic state law with other legal orders, the absence of a hierarchically superior position transcending the differences. This review discusses how legal pluralism engages with legal globalization and how legal globalization utilizes legal pluralism. It demonstrates how several international legal disciplines—comparative law, conflict of laws, public international law, and European Union law—have slowly begun to adopt some ideas of legal pluralism. It shows how traditional themes and questions of legal pluralism—the definition of law, the role of the state, of community, and of space—are altered under conditions of globalization. It addresses interrelations between different legal orders and various ways, both theoretical and practical, to deal with them. And it provides an outlook on the future of global legal pluralism as theory and practic...

287 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: A growing body of literature in organization studies draws on the idea that communication constitutes organization, often abbreviated to CCO as discussed by the authors and introduces Luhmann's theory of social systems as a prominent example of CCO thinking.
Abstract: A growing body of literature in organization studies draws on the idea that communication constitutes organization, often abbreviated to CCO This paper introduces Luhmann’s theory of social systems as a prominent example of CCO thinking I argue that Luhmann’s perspective contributes to current conceptual debates on how communication constitutes organization The theory of social systems highlights that organizations are fundamentally grounded in paradox because they are built on communicative events that are contingent by nature Consequently, organizations are driven by the continuous need to deparadoxify their inherent contingency In that respect, Luhmann’s approach fruitfully combines a processual, communicative conceptualization of organization with the notion of boundary and self-referentiality Notwithstanding the merits of Luhmann’s approach, its accessibility tends to be limited due to the hermetic terminology that it employs and the fact that it neglects the role of material agency in the communicative construction of organizations

114 citations

Posted Content
TL;DR: The concept of transnational legal pluralism as mentioned in this paper has been proposed to understand the evolution of law in relation and response to the development of "world society" in the context of regulatory governance.
Abstract: This paper draws out the analogies and connections between long-standing legal sociological insights into pluralistic legal orders and present concerns with the fragmentation of law outside of the nation state. Within the nation-state, the discovery of legal pluralism inspired a larger contestation of concepts of legal formalism, of the alleged unity of the legal order and of the hierarchy of norms against the background of a consistently advancing process of constitutionalization. This research heightened regulators’ sensitivity to blind spots and exclusionary dynamics in the design of rights, leading inter alia to wide-ranging efforts to render more effective access to justice, legal aid and legal representation. Another important consequence concerned an increased awareness of different levels and sites of norm-creation in various societal areas. Much of this is mirrored by today’s quest for a just, democratic and equitable global legal order, for example in the debate about ‘fragmentation of international law’ or ‘global administrative law’. But, while the legal pluralism debate largely unfolded in the context (and contestation) of relatively mature legal orders and institutions, such institutional frameworks and safeguards are largely absent on the international plane. As a result, the emergence of numerous norm-setting agencies, specialized courts and tribunals and regulatory networks are perceived as obstacles or impediments to the creation of a sound legal order on a global scale, rather than as inherent traits of an evolving legal order.In order to grasp the increasingly transterritorial nature of regulatory governance it is necessary to revisit the arguments in support of legal pluralism and, in particular, the legal pluralist critique of the association of law with the state. On that basis, it becomes possible to read the currently dominant narrative of the ‘end of law’ in an era of globalisation in a different light. Rather than describing the advent of globalisation as an end-point of legal development, the transnational perspective seeks to deconstruct the various law-state associations by understanding the evolution of law in relation and response to the development of ‘world society’. The currently lamented lack of democratic accountability, say, in international economic governance, can then be perceived as a further consequence in a highly differentiated and de-territorialized society. The paper thus rejects the attempts by lawyers to re-align transnational governance actors with traditional concepts of the state or of civil society and, instead, contrasts them with various advances in sociology and anthropology with regard to the evolution of ‘social norms’ and ‘spaces’ of governance and regulation. These perspectives effectively challenge present attempts to conceptualize a hierarchically structured global legal order. This article’s proposed concept of ‘transnational legal pluralism’ [TLP] goes beyond Philip Jessup’s 1956 idea of ‘transnational law’, through which he sought to both complement and challenge Public and Private International Law. TLP brings together insights from legal sociology and legal theory with research on global justice, ethics and regulatory governance to illustrate the transnational nature of law and regulation, always pushing against the various claims to legal unity and hierarchy made over time.

81 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a perspective on the interaction between formal and informal institutions in spatial planning in which they transform each other continuously, in processes that can be described and analyzed as ongoing reinterpretations.
Abstract: In this article, we present a perspective on the interaction between formal and informal institutions in spatial planning in which they transform each other continuously, in processes that can be described and analyzed as ongoing reinterpretations. The effects of configurations and dialectics are often ambiguous, only partially observable, different in different domains and at different times. By means of analyses of key concepts in planning theory and practice, this perspective is illustrated and developed. Finally, we analyze transformation options in planning systems, emphasizing the limits of formal institutions in transforming formal/informal configurations, and stressing the importance of judgment and conflict.

79 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A review of the preceding scholarly work and attempts to contextualize it in debates around global governance and global constitutionalism can be found in this paper, where the authors suggest that we ought to revisit legal sociological insights into the emergence of legal pluralism.
Abstract: Transnational law, since its iteration by Philip Jessup in the 1950s, has inspired a league of scholars to investigate into the scope, doctrine, sources and practice of border-crossing legal regulation. This paper reviews much of this preceding scholarly work and attempts to contextualize it in debates around global governance and global constitutionalism. These debates are no longer confined to international lawyers or political scientists. Together with anthropologists, sociologists, geographers and legal philosophers and legal theorists, these scholars have been significantly widening the scope of their investigation. The current, multi - and interdisciplinary research into the prospects of political sovereignty, democratic governance and legal regulation on a global scale suggests a further continuation of such intellectual bricolage and collaboration. The here presented paper builds on a larger research project into the methodology of transnational law and suggests that we ought to revisit legal sociological insights into the emergence of legal pluralism to make sense of today’s co-evolution of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, ‘public’ and ‘private’ laws – and social norms.

65 citations