Niklas Luhmann

Any organization, no matter how stolid, may be unsettled by the news that a new boss is about to take over. Talk in the hallways increases, staff worry about their jobs, uncertainty grows. Even when the change has happened, problems emerge when the boss who was hired to manage “from above” has to learn about the organization “from below.” In this book, Niklas Luhmann scrutinizes the relationship and shows how it is stretched to its limit by communication difficulties, demands for...

Love seems like the most personal experience, one that touches each of us in a unique way that is more personal than social, and hence it is not surprising that it has been largely neglected by sociologists and social theorists. While it has long been a central preoccupation of writers and novelists, love has rarely attracted anything more than the most cursory attention of social scientists. This short text, originally written in 1969 by the eminent German social theorist Niklas Luhmann, goes a...

In this important book Niklas Luhmann – one of the leading social thinkers of the late 20th century – analyses the emergence of ‘love' as the basis of personal relationships in modern societies. He argues that, while family systems remained intact in the transition from traditional to modern societies, a semantics for love developed to accommodate extra-marital relationships; this semantics was then transferred back into marriage and eventually transformed marriage itself. Drawing on a diverse...

Im Unterschied zu allen anderen Einführungen in die Systemtheorie führt hier der Urheber selbst in seine Theorie ein. Die Vorlesung zur Einführung in die Systemtheorie, die diesem Buch zugrunde liegt, zeigt Niklas Luhmann auf dem Höhepunkt seines souveränen Umgangs mit einer anspruchsvollen Theorie und der zu beschreibenden Gesellschaft. Die Einführung wird ihrem Namen auch insofern gerecht, als es Luhmann darum ging, seinem studentischen Publikum ein eigenes Arbeiten mit dieser Theorie zu...