TY - JOUR
T1 - Social Immune Mechanisms
T2 - Luhmann and Potentialization Technologies
AU - Åkerstrøm Andersen, Niels
AU - Stenner, Paul
N1 - Published online: September 5, 2019
PY - 2020/3
Y1 - 2020/3
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Liminality
KW - Management
KW - Niklas Luhmann
KW - Liminality
KW - Management
KW - Niklas Luhmann
UR - https://sfx-45cbs.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/45cbs?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&url_ctx_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&ctx_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF-8&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info:sid/sfxit.com:azlist&sfx.ignore_date_threshold=1&rft.object_id=954925498076&rft.object_portfolio_id=&svc.holdings=yes&svc.fulltext=yes
U2 - 10.1177/0263276419868768
DO - 10.1177/0263276419868768
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85070206200
VL - 37
SP - 79
EP - 103
JO - Theory, Culture & Society
JF - Theory, Culture & Society
SN - 0263-2764
IS - 2
ER -