Social Immune Mechanisms: Luhmann and Potentialization Technologies

Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen, Paul Stenner*

*Corresponding author for this work

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    Abstract

    Contemporary discourses of management are full of encouragements to ‘expect the unexpected’ and to celebrate ‘the future of the future’. Many new public managerial technologies of change – such as steering labs, future games, and managerial performance arts – promise the co-creative ‘potentialization’ of employees, citizens and organizations. This paper approaches such potentialization technologies as immune mechanisms which serve to protect the social system from itself. From a perspective inspired by autopoietic systems theory, potentialization technologies provide autoimmunity by problematizing institutional structures and providing ‘anti-structural’ space-times to facilitate transformation. There is a price to pay for this immune function, however, since these immune mechanisms cannot discriminate between productive and unproductive structures. By dissolving the certainty of the expectations that underlie the connectivity of diverse organizational operations, they risk harming the welfare systems that host them.
    Original languageEnglish
    JournalTheory, Culture and Society
    Volume37
    Issue number2
    Pages (from-to)79-103
    Number of pages25
    ISSN0263-2764
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Mar 2020

    Bibliographical note

    Published online: September 5, 2019

    Keywords

    • Liminality
    • Management
    • Niklas Luhmann

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