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Social system
About: Social system is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2974 publications have been published within this topic receiving 92395 citations.
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TL;DR: The present article argues that SIMSA offers a more coherent and parsimonious explanation for system justification than does SJT and argues that these inconsistencies can be resolved by a social identity model of system attitudes.
Abstract: Do the disadvantaged have an autonomous system justification motivation that operates against their personal and group interests? System justification theory (SJT; Jost & Banaji, 1994, Br. J. Soc. Psychol, 33, 1) proposes that they do and that this motivation helps to (1) reduce cognitive dissonance and associated uncertainties and (2) soothe the pain that is associated with knowing that one's group is subject to social inequality. However, 25 years of research on this system justification motivation has given rise to several theoretical and empirical inconsistencies. The present article argues that these inconsistencies can be resolved by a social identity model of system attitudes (SIMSA; Owuamalam, Rubin, & Spears, 2018, Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci, 27, 91). SIMSA assumes that instances of system justification are often in alignment with (rather than opposed to) the interests of the disadvantaged. According to SIMSA, the disadvantaged may support social systems (1) in order to acknowledge social reality, (2) when they perceive the wider social system to constitute a superordinate ingroup, and (3) because they hope to improve their ingroup's status through existing channels in the long run. These propositions are corroborated by existing and emerging evidence. We conclude that SIMSA offers a more coherent and parsimonious explanation for system justification than does SJT.
40 citations
TL;DR: In this article, it is argued that economic incentives present individual-level projections of systemic imperatives arising from the operational closure of the functional system of the economy, which makes economic actors insensitive to their critical dependence on their environment.
Abstract: The present paper explains why social dilemmas are endemic to the regime of functional differentiation theorized by Niklas Luhmann. It is argued that within this regime, social systems combine two systems-theoretic identities elaborated by the theories of Luhmann and Bertalanffy. Social systems are operationally closed and thus limitedly sensitive to the environment; at the same time, they are metabolically dependent on it. Social dilemmas are shown to originate from the conflict between these two identities, a conflict that occurs when social systems disregard their critical environmental dependence. An implication of the argument is that economic incentives present the individual-level projections of systemic imperatives arising from the operational closure of the functional system of the economy. This implication informs the institutional economics analysis of social dilemmas by explaining these in terms of the excessive intensity of economic incentives that makes economic actors insensitive to their critical dependence on their environment. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
40 citations
TL;DR: The theoretical biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela realized that any such attempt to define living systems in terms of goal, purpose, function, etc cannot capture what is distinctive about them: Their autonomy and unity, so system-closure is a prerequisite of their adequate conceptual comprehension.
Abstract: The attempt to define living systems in terms of goal, purpose, function, etc. runs into serious conceptual difficulties. The theoretical biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela realized that any such attempt cannot capture what is distinctive about them: Their autonomy and unity. Goal, purpose, etc. always define the system in terms of something extrinsic, whereas living systems are unique because they maintain their unitary continuity of pattern despite the ceaseless turnover of their components. So, system-closure is a prerequisite of their adequate conceptual comprehension. Maturana and Varela themselves found that system-closure pertains exclusively to their organization, i.e. the set of relations among system-components which unify them. For living systems this comprises the relation between the system-components and the processes which they undergo. This relation is self-referential because it is closed, i.e. it essentially (re)produces itself.
While this model worked very well in the biological domain, attempts to extend it to the social domain met with serious conceptual obstacles. The reason for this is that Maturana did not make a consistent enough application of it. He understood the components of social systems biologically (individuals, persons, etc.) and the relations between them socially (language). This inconsistency ruptured the system's organizational closure. Consequently organizational closure (autopoiesis) can be maintained only when both the components of social systems and their processes are of the same type: Social. This interpretation can be found in the work of Niklas Luhmann who recognizes that the components of social systems are not persons, individuals, actors or subjects but communicative actions themselves. This preserves the organizational closure of the system and permits the concept of autopoiesis to be used as a powerful instrument of social analysis.
40 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: In this article, a model of the therapeutic community response, summarized as a series of 71 inter-related propositions which give a very complex picture, is presented, but not to provide quantitative statements of them, but only to indicate whether the relationship is positive, negative, or in a few cases, curvilinear.
Abstract: and then considers carefully the sociological and methodological problems raised by these phenomena. This could be seen as an extension and application of his classic paper with Lazarsfeld on qualitative research; and the whole book leads on from Barton's work on property space and organizational measurement. Barton considers some of these sociological problems in detail-for instance, individual behaviour in the emergency social system. As he puts it, 'any large unfavorable change in the inputs of a social system disrupts its normal flow of activities and threatens the satisfactions and values of its members' (p. 65). Fire chiefs sometimes look after their families first. The most original and sociologically fascinating chapter is the fifth, on 'The Altruistic Community'. It considers the problem of motivation to help reduce suffering among community members in modern society. As he writes, 'arousing active altruistic behavior in a large part of the population is a most unusual event' (p. 206). He produces a model of the therapeutic community response, summarized as a series of 71 inter-related propositions which give a very complex picture. He does however compactly summarize them as a series of quasi-mathematical functions-not to provide quantitative statements of them, but only to indicate whether the relationship is positive, negative, or, in a few cases, curvilinear. He has in fact produced a model of informal mass activities in disasters. Naturally therefore he concludes with a consideration of the
40 citations