Newsletter, 7

1.-Letter from the president

2.-Message from the secretary

3.-From the editors

4.-Obituary: Niklas Luhmann

5.-Results of our applications for Research Committee status and name change

6.-Congress impressions from some of our session organizers:

Heinrich Ahlemeyer

Bruce Buchanan

Bernd Hornung

John Mingers

Otto van Nieuwenhuijze

Francisco Parra-Luna

7.-The future of our group:

Introduction

Bernd Hornung: "Sociocybernetics and ISA-RC51"

Vessela Misheva: "The name"

Vessela Misheva: "In defense of sociology"

Mike Byron: Comments on an earlier version of Misheva's above statement

Vessela Misheva: Rejoinder

A recent summary of Mike Byron's position

Bernd Hornung: "Answer to Vessela"

Francisco Parra-Luna: "On second-order cybernetics and related issues"

Bernard Scott: "Sociocybernetics: What's in a name?"

Richard Lee: "Dilemmas of identity"

8.-Our May 26-31, 1999 conference in Crete

9.-Our Zaragoza conference in 2000

10.-Our 2001 conference

11.-The 2002 Brisbane World Congress of Sociology

12.-Our Zaragoza website

13.-New website addresses of our members

14.-Our membership drive

15.-Discussion list "Sociocybernet"

16.-MikeTerpstra: "Reflection on Luhmannians"

17.-New developments in the social sciences and elsewhere

18.-Book reviews

19.-Congress announcements

20-The composition of our 1998-2002 board

The 14th World Congress of Sociology lies behind us. I am convinced that we can justly consider this event a big success. All of us who participated, not only the organizers, have invested a lot of time and effort since our first reflections during the meeting in Bucharest in 1996. Most important, it was not just work but teamwork which has resulted in the large number of sessions and many high quality papers presented.

A decisive event in Montreal was the promotion of our group to Research Committee on Sociocybernetics (RC51). This will provide us with a substantially better institutional basis to continue and to spread our scientific work in the social sciences. It should be an additional motivation for all of us not to rest on what we have achieved so far, but to continue building on it.

In this process I hope that our Honorary Presidents, newly elected and appointed in Montreal, will play an important role by sharing their precious experience and advice with us. Without both Walter Buckley and Felix Geyer what has developed into the ISA - Research Committee 51 would be unthinkable. This, however, for quite different reasons.

Walter Buckley has been a great pioneer in applying systems theory to the social sciences. In several major works he has made very substantial contributions to the body of theory and research on which our present work is based, and Walter Buckley continues to do so in his latest book which came out just before the congress. Having him as an Honorary President should provide us the opportunity for a continuing dialogue with one of the founding fathers of systems science and for the incorporation of a very important stream of systems thinking into our everyday research.

Felix Geyer, on the other hand, was a pioneer of our group which had started many, many years ago. The term "sociocybernetics", now our name, was first used in a book Felix published together with Hans van der Zouwen. His cybernetic work on alienation justifies to consider him a pioneer of what may be called "applied sociocybernetics", encouraging the development of a theoretical framework for the explanation of complex social phenomena. Without Felix' continuous efforts our group of people, distributed all over the world, would not have made contacts and friendships and especially would not have maintained them, in many cases over decades. Without his organizational skills and his far-sighted enthusiasm for systems theory in the social sciences it would hardly have been possible to transform a group of sometimes quite individualistic congress participants into a well-organized ISA -Research Committee.

Thus, while we owe much of our intellectual heritage to Walter Buckley, much of our social fabric we owe to Felix Geyer. I am certain we have made the right decision to have two such great persons as our honorary leaders.

With the Montreal Congress also our Board has changed. I hope the new Board will continue our previous successful work in a creative and dynamic way, implementing the promises and challenges implied in our promotion to Research Committee. Personally I want to thank all of you for the trust and confidence you have put in me by electing me as your new president. I'll do my best to maintain the dynamics and the spirit of this group, and I am sure we have a Board which is able to lead Sociocybernetics into the 21st century. However, what will come out of this scientific adventure does not depend primarily on the Board. After all, it is only an agency to facilitate scientific communications and productive and innovative research by you, the members of RC 51.
Now that the new Board is taking up its activities, I want to thank the outgoing Board for its hard work which has led to our present achievements. In particular I want to thank Kenneth Bailey, our previous president, for his contribution to the making of RC 51. He presided over our group in a difficult and dynamic phase of expansion and build-up of negentropy. This, in a way, fits well with his important theoretical contributions concerning the concept of entropy. Of course I also want to thank Felix who has been and still is much more than a Secretary to a lot of us. During many years he has been the leader of the invisible college which now has become visible as RC 51. This, after all, was the reason why our members present in Montreal voted unanimously for appointing him Honorary President. It is high time that the work now be done by others, yet we do not want to go ahead without his friendship and compassion.

This Newsletter appears on the heels of the 14th World Congress of the International Sociological Association. For those of us lucky enough to have been able to attend, it was an exciting, even euphoric, time. Reports on some of our highly successful sessions and joint sessions appear elsewhere in this Newsletter. Just before the Congress the status of the Working Group on Sociocybernetics and Social Systems (WG01) was upgraded with a name change to Research Committee on Sociocybernetics (RC51). This significant success depended on the organizational talents of the outgoing Secretary, Felix Geyer, who continues to occupy central node in the developing relational structure of the recently installed Board. The composition of the new Board may be viewed on our Zaragoza website managed by Chaime Marcuello--I heartily suggest all members pay it a visit.

Besides the quantity and quality of our scientific work, our recognition as a Research Committee depended on the extraordinary recruitment success of the outgoing Secretary. I am glad to report that in the near future we may see some augmentation in the all-important number of members who are also members in good standing of ISA. In fact, I will be contacting directly the ISA members who have expressed interest in RC51. This seems particularly appropriate at this moment as the intellectual themes of our scientific work are a subject of fruitful debate and our organizational plans for future activities begin to take concrete form.

Intellectually, the questions opened up in Montreal and, especially, by the change in our name have stimulated a vigorous airing of views over theoretical, axiological, methodological, and empirical issues relating to our group identity. A selection of the interventions in this on-going discussion may be found further ahead. Organizationally, we are in the process of preparing for our next interim Conference to be held in Crete: "Sociocybernetic Bridges Between the Past, Present and Future: Problems of Emergence and Increasing Complexity in Sustainable (Social) Systems", 26-31 May 1999. Incidentally, I traveled throughout Crete some years ago; it is a simply splendid island and I look forward to returning for four days of scholarly exchange and conviviality.

Finally, let me thank one and all for their support, and especially their patience, during this period of transition as I was getting my feet on the ground. The tone, the quality and the animation of our current deliberations and organizational activities suggest that we may be optimistic about the future.

FROM THE EDITORS

This is our seventh Newsletter, and our first one as a Research Committee. It is gratifying to note that we probably broke all existing records in ISA history: after our first board was elected in early 1995, our first Newsletter was published in January 1996 when we were still a Thematic Group. We became a Working Group again in November 1996, and were recognized as a Research Committee at the recent World Congress of Sociology in Montreal. Normally, it takes four years as a Thematic Group before one can become a Working Group, and another four years to become a Research Committee, provided all the relevant conditions are fulfilled. We only took a little over three years, and this is largely due to the activities of our members, and to the willingness of many of them to sign up also as ISA members.

We now have some 240 RC51 members, about half of whom are also ISA members. A new ISA rule stipulates that the maximum number of sessions at the next World Congress (Brisbane, 2002) will only be given to those Research Committees that have minimally 100 ISA members. While we presently are safely beyond this limit, it is nevertheless desirable that as many of you as possible will sign up for ISA membership. As most of you will know by now, you can read about the advantages of ISA membership at our Zaragoza website. If you have not looked at it yet, please do so now! It is located at http://www.unizar.es/sociocybernetics/ and will increasingly become the vehicle to transmit up-to-date information about our activities to our members and others. All our Newsletters as well as other information will be published on this website. Since our Newsletters for the time being will be published only twice annually, urgent information can best be viewed at Zaragoza, though for the foreseeable future it will also be transmitted as usual to each of our members by email.

Our new 1998-2002 board, elected by mail ballot shortly after the Montreal World Congress, promises to be a very active one. Its composition is mentioned on our Zaragoza website mentioned above, and at the end of this Newsletter. Ken Bailey stepped down as president, after leading our group through a rapid stage of growth culminating in our recent recognition as a Research Committee, and is succeeded by Bernd Hornung. Felix Geyer was pensioned per October 15, 1998, and was relieved to find an able successor as RC51 secretary in Richard Lee. Together with Cor van Dijkum, who can arrange for some support from the University of Utrecht, he will now co-edit the Newsletter. Unlike most of the members of our 1995-1998 board, the other board members were all elected for specific functions. Many of them already present short reports about their activities, or at least about their plans, in the present issue. The next issue will undoubtedly contain more elaborate reports.

The present issue contains first of all an obituary for Niklas Luhmann, written by our president. Luhmann was not only one of the most important systems theorists of our generation, but also a great sociologist. Bernd Hornung will write a more detailed obituary for the next issue of the ISA Bulletin.

In order to give especially those of our members who could not make it to Montreal some idea of what the congress was like, we have asked our Montreal session organizers to present short reports - not so much presenting a detailed overview of the results of their sessions, but rather giving their personal impressions about their own session, the other RC51 sessions, and the congress as a whole. Six reports were received in time for publication in this issue, and they give useful ideas about improving the organization and general setup of our meetings in the future, especially the next World Congress in 2002 in Brisbane.

A large part of this Newsletter is devoted to what started out as a discussion about our name, inititated by Francisco Parra-Luna's October 20 email, which was sent to all of you, as well as Felix Geyer's October 27 reply. Subsequently, there developed an intensive and still ongoing discussion between our board members, part of which is reproduced in this Newsletter. The original issue was whether or not we should change our name back again to "Sociocybernetics and Social Systems Theory", largely in view of a supposedly conservative and manipulative image of cybernetics. In the meantime, this issue has broadened to a discussion about our identity as a group, the borders of our field, the character of cybernetics versus General Systems Theory, etc.

We have selected a few emails from board members that might stimulate the start of a potentially very interesting discussion, which could be continued in forthcoming Newsletter issues. We therefore herewith want invite all of you to join it, although in view of the large range of concrete subjects dealt with so far by our different board members, such a discussion might be rather chaotic at first. On top of this, our webmaster Chaime Marcuello has already offered to open our Zaragoza website to such a (monitored) discussion between our members, while we also encourage you to sign up for our discussion list "Sociocybernet", which will hopefully become a vehicle for an (unmonitored) discussion about the same subjects (see page 32).

As to our planned conferences, our main activity in 1999 will be our May 26-31 annual meeting in Crete, already announced earlier. Papers are invited that fit the rather broad theme: "Sociocybernetic Bridges between the Past, Present and Future: Problems of Emergence and Complexity in Sustainable Systems". In view of the rather limited number of rooms at the convent and in the immediate vicinity, those interested to participate should react as soon as possible - see page29. Our 2000 conference will take place in Zaragoza; the next issue of the Newsletter will contain more detailed information. The site of our 2001 conference has not yet been decided, but possibilities are investigated to have this conference in Latin America or possibly Japan.

The next World Congress of Sociology (Brisbane, 2002) is still far away, and it is as yet too early to appoint session organizers. However, there is one function in our 1998-2002 board that is not yet fulfilled: the board still lacks a session coordinator who will coordinate the session organizers and will ultimately be responsible for the RC51 session program at the World Congress. If there are any volunteers for this important function (see pp. 30-31 for a task description) which obviously demands your presence in Brisbane, please announce your interest to the secretary (rlee@binghamton.edu).

Our webmaster Chaime Marcuello has done an excellent job so far in constructing and expanding our website. He now has the approval from the university for a further expansion, and has plans for a Spanish version. Please approach him directly if you have any suggestions for materials to add to our website.

Subsequently, there is information about how to subscribe to our discussion list "Sociocybernet", mentioned above. Especially since this discussion list is an excellent vehicle for involvement in the discussions around our name, the borders of our field, our specific identity, etc., you are encouraged to sign up for this list (see page 32 for further details). This is followed by a contribution from Mike Terpstra entitled "Reflection on Luhmannians", in which he distinguishes three different types of followers of Niklas Luhmannn.

In the following, Paul Maiteny (new developments) and Bernard Scott (book reviews) already provide some initial ideas about how to fulfil their respective functions.

Finally, plans are being investigated at the moment whether a small sociocybernetics section can be organized during the triannual WOCS congress at Brunel University, London. This 11th International Congress of Cybernetics and Systems is the successor to the 1996 10th congress in Bucharest, where our group - then still a Thematic Group - formed the largest and most important section (see page 37).
 

OBITUARY: NIKLAS LUHMANN

Upon the death of Niklas Luhmann our president sent the following letter of condolence to the dean of the Faculty of Sociology, University of Bielefeld.

Dear Sir,

Personally and on behalf of the members of Research Committee 51 - Sociocybernetics - of the International Sociological Association I want to express our sadness and grief at the death of Prof. Niklas Luhmann. We feel a great loss, as he was the most important contemporary intellectual leader and representative of systems science in sociology. Indeed, his influence extended far beyond sociology.

We owe a particular debt to Prof. Luhmann for many important findings, breakthroughs, and intellectual challenges. Being a group which has existed for almost twenty years in a more or less institutionalized way, we are uniting scientists from all the social sciences, and many other relevant fields. We mourn the loss of Prof. Luhmann´s scientific leadership all the more, now that our group, and the systems science for which it stands, has achieved formal recognition by the international sociological community as a Research Committee within the International Sociological Association.

We would have wished very much to continue learning from Prof. Luhmann's contributions and cooperation within this new institutional framework. A number of us have known him personally and been his students at Bielefeld. His death will be an obligation for us to preserve his legacy and to continue in his interdisciplinary and inquiring spirit in exploring the frontiers of sociological systems science. His credo of "Sociological Enlightenment" certainly deserves to be adopted by all of us as a major orientation to our work.

Sincerely, with condolences
 

About our application for Research Committee status we can be very short: it was sent May 18 to the Research Coordinating Committee, and was approved by that Committee as well as by the ISA Executive Committee at their meetings during the week preceding the World Congress. Moreover, on the basis of the results of an enquiry in Newsletter 3, a request to change our name from "Sociocybernetics and Social Systems Theory" to just "Sociocybernetics" was also sent at the same date and was similarly approved. In the meantime, triggered by Francisco Parra-Luna's objections to this name change (see his October 20 email to all RC51 members), a wide-ranging discussion ensued between the board members not only about our name, but also about the nature of our group, the borders of our fields, the specific character of our methodological approach, etc. Some interesting parts of this discussion are reported elsewhere in this Newsletter.

Contents 

We asked the session organizers to send us their impressions of our sessions at the Montreal World Congress, and their impressions of the congress as a whole. Reports were received from the following session organizers, which certainly provide a diversified image of what it was like to participate in this congress, especially for those of you who could not be there. The criticisms expressed in some of these reports will certainly help to improve the organization of our subsequent conferences.
 

If our congress in Bucharest in late August 1996 was an outstanding experience for me, this was also due to the spatial 'closure' of the congress system in the Triumf Hotel, where - thanks to Felix' intervention - all of us stayed. The papers and positions could thus be talked over in small circles at breakfast and at dinner. Forming a rather lucid subsystem within the context of the 10th International Congress on Systems and Cybernetics, we got to know each other as persons quite well. The spatial closure allowed for social and intellectual openness. At the end of a four day's congress, I felt like we had worked together for at least two weeks.

Conditions in Montreal were partly different, partly a continuation of our Bucharest meeting. The14th World Congress of Sociology, of which we were but a very small subsystem, constituted a different environment; the boundaries to the larger congress system were much more open and pervious in both directions. For a sociologist, there were quite a few temptations to be resisted from attractive offers in other research committees. Beyond working hours, we were dispersed over two or three hotels so that it was sometimes not quite as easy to meet informally.

And yet, Room PC 401-A in the Convention Centre, though somewhat small and without a daylight window, was a home base over the seven days of the congress to me. It was here where I felt safe, comfortable and stimulated in terms of paradigms, topics and persons. Whereas the World Congress in general reflected in its size and in its relative intransparency the high-complexity environment of global society, I experienced our sociocybernetic research committee as a "modern community", as Felix Geyer has called this emerging type of social system (Kybernetes Vol. 21 No.2, 1992, 33-49). Members of 'modern communities' come from totally different backgrounds and meet only occassionally. Their intermittent contacts are not locally induced, but based on choice, such as professional interest or being emotionally on the same wave-length. If treated properly, these societal communities "keep some of the directness, primary group nest-warmth, the safety and solidarity" of more traditional communities without sharing their restrictions. They allow for instance for a high degree of internal complexity, which we were certainly able to experience during our Montreal sessions. With the solid social basis from Bucharest, in Montreal our RC has made good headway in making the concept of a 'modern community' real and actually living it.

I organized my own congress participation entirely around RC 51 as the pivotal point. Without this research committee, after all, I would not have gone to Montreal. And I was richly awarded. Of the three sociological world congresses that I have attended, I enjoyed and appreciated this last one by far the most. If on my way back from Montreal I was very happy with my decision to have gone there, it was because I had experienced our work RC 51 as offering both the necessary closure and a sufficient openess. I found a safe port and a stimulating environment. Thank you to all of you who made this possible.

Further progress is possible and desirable: 1) We need to have more of a common focus in topic and subject, at least for some of our meetings. 2) We need to work together more closely in the intermediate phases between our meetings and use existing approriate tools for that purpose, such as Teamroom for instance. 3) And we need to use the precious time that we spend together even more deliberately. Much of the receptive work can be done in advance so that we find more time for a lively dialogue.

Our Crete conference is less than six months ahead, and I am very much looking forward to meeting you there.
 

Papers presented in the session on Sociocybernetics and Human Values (chaired by Bruce Buchanan) dealt with complex questions of systems and evaluative criteria at several levels of complexity e.g. biological and social origins (Artigiani); educational functions and contributions (Boyd); institutional management (Hall); the systemic nature of sustainability (Maiteny); and the needs of contemporary society for information relevant to priority societal issues (Buchanan). Each author presented a variety of considerations related to his topic, all in highly condensed forms. The meeting provided an opportunity to introduce a variety of thoughtful contributions into the public domain.

However, the constraints of such a conference, perhaps inevitable, did not really permit substantial discussion or adequate feedback for authors - at the meeting, at any rate. Unlike more narrowly scientific or technical meetings, where assumptions and context are well understood, and where the focus is more specific, sociocybernetic perspectives cannot be taken for granted and may be among the issues to be evaluated. Thus requirements for communication, reflection and feedback/discussion may therefore be complex and time-consuming.

Under such conditions, it may in the future be useful to provide for advance distribution of papers, and for better prepared discussion, perhaps by participants who agree in advance to provide comments, to increase the usefulness of sessions.

It is difficult for this write to draw any conclusions about what may have been accomplished. The issue may be generic, and related to an assessment of the purposes and conditions of such conferences. There are many who believe that much valuable material is regularly lost, i.e. is not evaluated, and in fact becomes ireetrievable. Our sessions may also illustrate this generalization.

In general terms, an important task is to provide for the effective appraisal of scholarly contributions and to facilitate incorporation in accessible literature, and appropriate utilization where possible. This is a challenge for which second order cybernetics is uniquely qualified.

Moreover, there may be career oppotunities for younger sociocyberneticians who make it their interest to discern emerging as well as converging trends. As in many other specialized fields, there may be value in regular assessments of current ideas, and applications in progress, under the auspices of a Journal or Yearbook.
 

The session on "Constructing Sociocybernetic Society - Towards an Integration of Society, Technology, Information, and Ecology" was held on Friday, July 31, from 14:00-16:00hs. Although towards the end of the congress, the particular time slot proved as quite good in terms of audience.

The session consisted of a total of 10 papers, 8 of which were presented. Apparently quite heterogeneous at the first look, all of the papers turned out to form a logical sequence and to present the topic as a unit. The session started with theoretical considerations followed by case studies at the national, regional, and organizational level. It was concluded with papers on value problems and considerations on strategies for sustainable development.

Unfortunately, and this was also criticized by participants and presenters, both the time for presentations and for discussion was very short. In this way, the overall topic could not be further developed together with the participants. Relations and contradictions between the individual papers could not be discussed. Although a session in a World Congress could be considered rather a "window for presentation" than a place for intensive discussion, the time available was very much limited. Of course, this problem also resulted in part from the fact that quite a number of participants was not sure to come, up to the last minute.

For future congresses we could distinguish between "window" sessions and "discussion" sessions perhaps already in the program. For both, clear limits on the number of papers should be set.

Technically the session had very good conditions. I enjoyed very much the experience of a mix of competent presentations ranging from purely oral presentations to Internet life, looking at a website in Spain. I think we should promote and encourage such a diversity of styles of presentation in our future meetings, avoiding the standard-uniform-beautiful-colorful-boring-slides-only-style I have seen in some congresses.

In particular I enjoyed the period of preparation, contacting the future participants, discussing and getting to know each other by mail, and finally meeting the real persons in Montreal.
 

This was one of the most crowded sessions with ten papers addressing the relevance of autopoiesis for social theory. The issues covered were: are firms autopoietic? (Biggiero); an Aristotelian model of autopoiesis (Dougall); knowledge as an autopoietic system (Fujigaki); autopoiesis and language/ phenomenology (Introna); autopoiesis and apoptosis (Ishikawa); Luhmann's social theory (Jokisch); autopoiesis and governance (Little); autopoiesis and embodied cognition (Mingers); modelling Luhmann's theories (Simon); and autopoiesis and creativity (Gornev).

There was undoubtedly much interest in the subject, and the speakers approached autopoiesis from a variety of viewpoints, and in a range of application domains. Undoubtedly the main problem was the lack of time. Each speaker had only about 10 minutes - far too short to give a good account; and there was virtually no time for questions. Indeed many in the audience wanted to have an extra session just to debate the varied issues surrounding autopoiesis.

Ideas for dealing with this in future conferences might be: more poster presentations and less spoken ones; special sessions simply for discussion of the issues that have arisen from the papers; someone giving an introduction/overview at the beginning; papers given out in advance and not presented but simply discussed, possibly initiated by a discussant; panel sessions in which a range of issues are discussed by selected participants.
 

Herewith my reply to a request, by Felix Geyer, for my evaluation of the meeting in Montreal. Below, I have listed some of the points which came to my mind (often were on my mind still), in an arbitrary sequence. Point 7 however would appear crucial to me.

1) Get feedback from everybody there, not just the session organisers; they are no more representative for personal experience than others

2) At the operational level I found the conference organisers very bureaucratic; not surprising with the arena they convened.

3) As a meeting, I'd call it a dinosaur. Enormous mass and bulk, relatively small brains, and in a way a relic from the past. To have 5000 people there, half (!) of which preach, shows that quantity prevails over quality. Which to me spells that money is probably the message. Evidently it fulfills a need, in an academic society where "Publish or Perish" is the creed, and a gathering like this spells prestige in some way. I regard it as a pathology which needs to be resolved, at some time. (Hm, I realise that I can not well judge the size of the dynosaur brain; it seemed adequate for its needs. And as for the level of intelligence in the conference, I can only judge whatever sessions I have seen. In this, I found that some of the most inspiring were in 'our own' sessions. Which I consider a good sign for the potentials for this work group 'per se'.)

4) I heard the meeting described as a slave market; where the corridors serve as a setting for employment and climbing the ranking. I reckon that this could well be all too true; and it would be sad if that would be the only role for a gathering like this.

5) As a setting for the Work Group, and its creation, it evidently fulfilled its role; and there is evident merit in this. In this respect i am glad that this bulk conference 'was there'.

6) In spite of the monstrousity of this event, there were some very clear touches of care and concern. Hostesses at the airport to help the arrivals. Music on the balcony of various sorts and kinds. And more details like these. Even the organisation of an internet centre, be it even belated, showed a willingness 'to provide more'.

7) There are some real drawbacks to the overcrowding, and this point I cannot stress too much: to have time allotted to session organisers, instead of to presenters, is not 'a way to go'. To realise that sessions with two or three speakers 1) can exist and 2) get the same time as other sessions, is one of the reasons why I will not return to this meeting itself. I'll rather make certain that the presenters get the time and attention which their qualities are due.

8) Aside from the over-all conference organisation, I find that Felix Geyer has done an excellent job in 1) preparing the ambiance, 2) providing contact and information, beforehand and on the spot, 3) maintaining an overall integrity of the gathering and presentations by support/organisational decisions while the conference went on, and 4) achieving good organisational closure by, in retrospect, continuing to check for satisfaction and integrity, by questionnaires like this.
 

In the Session which I coordinated seven papers were finally presented since some of the papergivers did not go to Montreal. That was even a positive circumstance given that we had at the beginning 11 papers to be presented. I want to thank Jose Luis Piñuel because he accepted not to present his paper given the lack of time within the two hours available. From the seven papers presented, six were centered around the notion of PERFORMANCE OF SOCIAL SYSTEMS, either in relation with specific social systems as in the cases of Felix Tretter (hospital), Antonio Sanchez-Sucar (airline company) or Dario Menanteau (more specifically centered on the problem of income distribution in Chile). The papers of Pis'mak/Smirnov and Parra-Luna on the contrary dealt with some theoretical lists of concepts and indicators to ensure an acceptable perception or measurement of the concept of performance. In relation with this task, which was the Leitmotiv of the session, the interest of many of the session participants has to be noted about how to know, define or deal with such a concept, giving that the overall PERFORMANCE is the final goal of any system. In spite of the very little time we had for discussion, two dimensions were open for future discussions:

a) The central role of the concept of performance in sociological research, and at the same time the difficulties for approaching the concept, since at least two subdimensions have to be studied:
a1: Which VALUES have to be pursued by the social system (which implicitly means to adopt the individual human being as the fundamental elementary unit of the social system); and
a2: Which information or data should we take into account to register the performance of the system.

b) Only if we take into account the concept of performance, can we advance towards the study of the cybernetic procedures of social systems, since cybernetics is fed, first of all from the achieved outputs of the system and second from the programmed or desired outputs. Even if the reader interprets my accent on the outputs as a new argument in favor of maintaining the name of SYSTEM, I have to say, and I think in agreement with some other colleagues, that we need first to know the essential difference between the two kinds of outputs in order to be able to speak of, or to apply, the philosophy of cybernetics, or in our case sociocybernetics. That is why the analysis of the theoretical structure of the social system and its goals and general objectives, should in principle have absolute priority to any sociocybernetic appproach. As to the ongress as a whole, it seemed to me quite well organized and I have nothing special to say.

Contents 

Introduction:
As stated in our "From the Editors", Francisco Parra-Luna's objections to our name change as expressed in his October 20 email to all RC51 members triggered an intensive discussion between the board members. This discussion indeed started out as a discussion about our name change and resulted in a relatively high degree of consensus about that name change, which was formally approved in Montreal. It should be noted, by the way, that our name can be changed again by submitting a request to this effect to the 2000 meeting of the Research Coordinating Comittee, whether back to the old name or to a new name, if the majority of our members would consider this desirable. Subsequently, this discussion widened into a discussion about the nature and distinguishing characteristics of our group as compared with other ISA Research Committees, about the borders of our field, about the methodology and axiology to be used, about the differences and commonalities between cybernetics and General Systems Theory, etc.

Some of the most interesting parts of this discussion are reproduced here. The different texts were largely produced between mid-October and late December, and often refer to each other. Inevitably, they are repetitive to some extent, but are nevertheless reproduced in their entirety to enable the reader to follow the line of argument. A relatively recent piece by Francisco Parra-Luna is included, in which he summarizes his objections against what he fears to be the consequences of our name.

The editors want to try and remain neutral in this respect, and merely want to point out that one's attitudes for or against either (socio)cybernetics or Social Systems Theory (as derived from GST) depend to a large extent on which period in the development of cybernetics and GST one is most knowledgeable about and concentrates on. They agree with what our president has stated below, that sociocybernetics can be considered a shorthand for "systems science in sociology" (rather than for GeneraL Systems Theory) and that our group needs to market this concept, not least through the quality of its collective work.

Bernd R. Hornung (hornung@mailer.uni-marburg.de): "Sociocybernetics and ISA-RC51"
(slightly revised and corrected version of original email)

For many of us "Sociocybernetics" is nothing new. It was already in the name of our previous "Working Group on Sociocybernetics and Social Systems Theory" which, like the names of a number of other associations or congresses, combined "systems and cybernetics". Such combinations result in a certain vagueness which permits to avoid internal discussion. But it also permits the outsider all kinds of misunderstandings which cannot really be countered.

Choosing the name "Sociocybernetics" permits in my opinion to create a well-defined trademark and to avoid a number of problems. Of course, definitely not all problems can be avoided, but all other alternatives also imply difficulties. For some, the term might look like a new label only. We should be aware, however, that it is a lot more than that. It is a commitment which is of importance in particular in the context of ISA, a sociological association. "Sociocybernetics" is a short and distinctive name which, I hope, will become a trademark for excellency and interdisciplinarity in the social sciences.

In a way, this term can tell us all the essential things about our group. The "cybernetics" part clearly refers to systems theory and cybernetics, disciplines more abstract and more general than sociology. These, however, we wish to apply and use in sociology. The "socio" part clearly refers to sociology and social systems, the field of activity of ISA. It seems to be clear in a systems context, that "sociology" is to be understood in a wide sense and most often stands for "social sciences".

Translating the shorthand of "sociocybernetics" into "systems science in sociology" I think we are well equipped with a concise and precise definition of how we want to carry our work into the next millennium, using the general tools of systems science and cybernetics in the particular discipline of sociology. We should really insist on "systems SCIENCE", i.e. not only on theory, but on theory, methodology, empirical, and applied approaches along with axiology.

Being myself an extremely interdisciplinary scientist with a very strong identification with General System Theory, I am well aware that there are certain risks with "cybernetics", at least in some languages like my own, German. "Cybernetics", if understood in a very traditional way, may get associated with a very narrow engineering and steering-and-control sciences approach. It seems to me, however, that all of us agree, that such a restriction is not intended in our group.

I don't see this danger very much in the COMPOSED term of "Sociocybernetics", which is not yet very widespread. Therefore I think, to what extent we shall be misunderstood or not will depend very much on what we make out of "Sociocybernetics" and how we succeed in marketing this concept along with our collective scientific work.

"Sociocybernetics" has not only the invaluable advantage of being a short, precise, and concise term. It also permits to avoid the problem of "systems theory" which is usually and implicitly understood in a much wider sense than is justified by a precise look. Being scientific implies striving for clarity and precision. Therefore, I personally try to avoid in many cases "systems theory" or the quite vague "approach" in favor of "systems science". After all, most of us much of the time do not only talk about and work with theory, but also engage in empirical and applied research, methodology, and hopefully in the future even more than until now about axiology. All of this together is not "theory" but "science".

If the "cybernetics" of sociocybernetics is identified with "systems science", it does not make sense to add another "and social systems science/theory". If it is not, it also does not make sense, because then "systems science/theory" is a much more encompassing concept including already cybernetics! [1] Furthermore, in such a combination the "socio" tends to get lost, as systems science/theory is not at all limited to a particular discipline like sociology. Yet after all, while insisting on interdisciplinarity, our reason of being ISA-RC51 is that we want to concentrate on sociology.

I am therefore fully convinced that "Sociocybernetics" is a very good name for our Research Committee. If it needs further explanation we should add, as a kind of subtitle, that it is "Systems Science in Sociology". Such a subtitle would not require an official name-change, even if we specify such an addition in our statutes. Science, encompassing theory, axiology, empirical studies, application, and methodology, is clearly what a Research Committee should be concerned with.

-----------
1) It sounds rather awkward to add to "Sociocybernetics":
- "and Sociological Systems Science"
- "and Systems Science in the Social Sciences"
- "and Systems Science in Sociology"

Also the semantically certainly most perfect formulation: "Sociocybernetics - Systems Science in the Social Sciences" sounds very awkward to me, although it may be acceptable for a lawyer.
 

Vessela Misheva (Vessela.Misheva@soc.uu.se): "The Name - What I understand by Sociocybernetics and why I think that the name of RC51 as it is now is sufficient and relevant" (edited version of original October 8 email)

1. The main grounds for any possible misunderstanding concerning the significance of the new name are connected with the fact that the name of an RC in the ISA usually refers to the field in which the members feel themselves to be specialists and are currently engaged. In our case, however, we evidently seek to promote the development of a new field that has not existed in the past and has no traditions other than those that are created here and now. In this sense, there is perhaps no contradiction between the differing opinions concerning the name of RC51 if we clearly state that the name does not indicate the field in which we may be specialists (such as cybernetics or systems theory) but rather stands for a new type of complex scientific enterprise that is currently emerging.

2. I am of the opinion that sociocybernetics already is or should become a new sociological field that marks off the technological stage in the development of the social sciences. Not surprisingly, the rapid development of systems ideas in the social sciences during the second half of this century has quite often been connected (in both East and West) with the idea of social technology. For this reason, the term sociocybernetics points sociology into the future, while the search for new types of theoretical systems and frameworks for describing the world drags it back into the past. However, this does not mean that systems theory is marginalised or removed from the focus of attention. On the contrary, systems theory is the necessary and only legitimate foundation for the development of sociocybernetics.

Not much investigation is required to see that the age of "grand theories" and theoretical proliferation in the social sciences is over. Now is rather the time to select and utilize those of them which work. In this respect, I assume that sociocybernetics is able to provide us with the needed selection criteria.

What I most like about the term "sociocybernetics" is that it suggests action instead of sociological contemplation and theorizing. This serves to orient the theoretical means of sociological analysis to practical uses, whether these involve the search for solutions to complex social phenomena, the interpretation of social, historical, and philosophical puzzles, or the construction of theoretical and linguistic links. Therefore, even the more philosophical trends in social science that deal with constructivist ideas belong here, even if they have little to do with systems theory directly.
From this perspective, I do not see how sociocybernetics can be understood as a branch of or just one aspect of systems theory. Of course, much depends on what we understand by cybernetics and whether we take it with its pragmatic, and thus more popular, meaning as the science of management and control, or with its original meaning as the science of the links between two incommensurable opposites (such as living and non-living systems, but not necessarily only these).

3. If we are to restore the name "Sociocybernetics and Social Systems Theory," then the latter term must be in the plural. In contemporary science, the term "systems theory" does not convey a single image and does not express a unitary idea. It rather reflects the stage of an extreme differentiation of and discontinuity in knowledge. Thus, when we talk about systems theory, we always have to begin with an explanation of "which" or "whose" systems theory we have in mind. Fortunately enough, this is not the case with cybernetics. It is immediately clear to virtually everyone that Sociocybernetics, just like "autopoiesis," is a new term whose full meaning is not to be found through a literal translation of the compound words.

4. Finally, the name "RC 51 on Sociocybernetics" creates the impression of a unified group of scholars who do one and the same thing, while the previous name instead radiates the image of an eclectic union of only loosely connected research interests.

It seems that here we encounter the well known sociological paradox: what is obvious for one is not necessarily obvious for another. In this respect, it will be very important to find out what is obvious to all of us. Stated otherwise, we must clarify the views that we share (or at least do not mind to share) in common for only these can provide the secure foundation upon which our group can be built. Moreover, the precise definition of the name of our group is also connected with the definition of the boundaries of the field and the criteria for membership in our RC. There can be no better start for a group such as ours with its newly acquired status than the clarification of the question "What kind of sociological research field does RC51 represent?" or "What are we doing?"
 

Vessela Misheva (Vessela.Misheva@soc.uu.se): "In defense of sociology"
(edited version of October 28 letter)

In respect to the recent correspondence that has been conveniently subsumed under the heading "discussions on the name of the group," I increasingly have the impression that the discussion only seems to concern cybernetics and systems theory. It in fact addresses the nature of sociology and her relationship with philosophy. This question is one of the themes with which I am currently occupied (perhaps you remember that the topic of one of my Montreal presentations concerned the identity of sociology).

Consequently, I feel it necessary to say a few words "In Defence of Sociology". The issue here is whether sociology will continue to exist in the shadow of philosophy, or instead find its identity as a science with its own observation position distinct from that of metaphysics and thus with its own scientific tasks.

The difference between systems theory in sociology (now sociocybernetics as well) and the systems traditions which have existed in philosophy and the natural sciences is that sociology does not view the world as a world of objects, and certainly not as a world of "black boxes." Sociology does not speak about human beings as devices with outputs and inputs; neither are human beings parts, nor are social systems wholes constructed from human bodies. Sociology studies neither man nor organizations as physical substances or objects. Rather, they are to be constructed as objects from the relationships that take place between human beings [1]. Stated otherwise, social relationships are the object of sociology.

We are not sociologists or philosophers because of the simple fact that we use the terms "systems theory" or "cybernetics" in our works, but rather because of the ways in which we use these concepts and the ways in which we understand them. It is the observation position which matters. In this respect, I doubt whether it is possible to have an interdisciplinary group without any particular criteria whatsoever, as if merely using the term "systems theory" would suffice to identify some scholar as a member of RC51 [2]. By "particular criteria" I primarily mean "sharing an observation position."

Therefore, I am even more convinced by our recent correspondence that the term "systems theory" should be removed from the name of the group since using it will inevitably attract new members who are strongly affiliated to the philosophical pattern of systems theorizing. I define the latter in a narrow sense as characterised by a "subject-object" frame of thinking that is incompatible with the sociological mode of thinking [3], which observes the relationships between subject and object. Sociology is not merely an application of the philosophical approach to the study of a new object, namely, the social system. On the contrary, sociology emerged as a silent movement of rebellion against the philosophization of the social.

I would also like to note in this regard that here lies the essential difference between the autopoietic systems theories of Luhmann and Maturana. It may be the case that Luhmann did something "illegal" from the point of view of philosophy and its offspring (the natural sciences). It is true that even today philosophers find it very difficult to understand precisely what Luhmann does and how society can be viewed as an autopoietic system. However, it is clear for every sociologist that this is not a matter of truth and falsehood but rather a matter of perception and observation position. That is to say that what is obvious here for sociologists is not obvious for philosophers. The sociologist is able to see more in respect to society than the philosopher precisely because he juxtaposes the double perspective of his inside/outside position to the single perspective of the philosopher.

Luhmann may be the most philosophical of today's sociologists, but his "philosophy" is sociological, not metaphysical. He did not simply apply the concept of "autopoiesis" to the description of a new object, as may seem the case to an external observer. Such an "external observer" is every philosopher who considers sociology to be merely a "branch of philosophy" with a different object of study, who does not understand the profound difference between the observation positions of the two. When Luhmann created the sociological theory of autopoietic systems, he actually translated the theory of autopoiesis into the language of sociology. That is why he cannot be criticised from the point of view of the original version of the theory. The success of his efforts can only be established without the framework of sociology herself.

There is no doubt that Luhmann' systems theory, as one of the most serious achievements in twentieth century sociological thought, demands serious study, but it cannot be understood by analogy with other systems theories. What must further be taken into account is that Luhmann's systems theory in macrosociology has no pretensions to explain the social world as a whole. It rather seeks to explain only social organization, and it leaves human beings as physical and psychic units in the environment of social systems. Thus, while it explains how the world as a system of communications works, it does not concern itself with either the world of action or the world of feelings, something which must also be taken into consideration if we intend to explain the human being as a whole, i.e., as a reasoning (communicating), acting, and feeling being.

For this reason, the question is not to choose the "correct" systems theory from those which now exist in the social sciences but rather connect them with one another in order for the human being to finally emerge. For example, the issue is to connect Luhmann's theory of communications with Parsons' theory of social action, and also perhaps with a theory of the psychic system as a possible elaboration of Mead's theory of the social self.

Moreover, not only may using the term "systems theory" in the title of our group attract those affiliated to the philosophical pattern of systems theorizing, it may also attract specialists from other fields who make no difference between systems theory in sociology and general systems theory. "Systems Theory" should not comprise part of the name of a Research Committee that is specifically sociological, and systems theory in the general sense should not remain as a Group subtitle on our home page [4].

I strongly disagree that RC51 should be transformed into a group working on systems theory in general. This would mean no less than its transformation into a faceless aggregate of experts in systems theory who do not meet the basic requirement of thinking sociologically. Indeed, sociocybernetics, as a sociological enterprise inspired by the emergence of systems theory in macrosociology, may be capable of helping sociology find her "true identity." This would mean that sociology should cease playing the role of a "lesser philosophy" and become what she was intended to become, namely, a science of man as a social being, as a communicating, acting, and feeling human being [5].

However, it may be possible for those philosophers and natural scientists who are interested in cooperation with sociologists in matters concerning systems approaches to form a separate group within RC51. This could be sufficient to indicate our separate fields of competence, serving to make us aware that we talk about different things and do not argue over who is wrong or right in this respect. This is a matter of professional conviction that stems from our observation positions, whether we are aware of this fact or not [6].

In conclusion, I would like to emphasize that the question of RC51's name did not arise merely by chance. It is instead a repetition of an old story that has beset sociology from her beginning, namely, as soon as something new emerges, a schism arises concerning its essence that finishes with a division into two opposing camps. Such division is a "philosophical disease." But sociology does not follow in the steps of philosophy and is not philosophy's pupil, being concerned with building links rather than with divisions.

I therefore propose that the main body of RC51's membership be comprised of people (regardless of their fields of competence and areas of current interest) who share the observation position defined above as "sociological." This position does not require a sociological education. What is necessary for the formation ("education") of a sociologist is a socialization in no less than two different worlds, i.e. on the very boundary between them. The concrete nature of these worlds (different cultures, different nations, different sciences, spheres of occupation, etc.) is not of primary importance. What does matter is the "inside-outside" position that a person with such double belonging occupies and the advantage that it provides for seeing sociological "things" ("facts" as Durkheim would have it) from two sides, i.e., in their interconnectedness, similarity, and difference.

Those who wish to pursue their philosophical inspirations in the area of systems theory within the "subject-object" framework may certainly find a place for themselves within RC51 as a "sub-group," but this should not be taken an alternative on equal standing with the main sociological orientation.
 

Mike Byron (mpbyron1@home.com): Comments on an earlier version of Vessela Misheva's above statement (see footnote numbers in the above statement):
Editors' note: Since Mike Byron's comments were on an earlier version of Vessela Misheva's statement, not all comments have been included here. However, Mike Byron has summarized his position below.

I've given my friend Vessela's thoughtful comments considerable thought. IF I understand her correctly, I must agree with her in part, while dissenting in part.

1) This is inoffensive enough, but where is she leading?

2) This seems to be a bit worrisome. What is her point? Should members of RC 51 be required to adopt an official 'ideology'? Is the interdisciplinary nature of the group seen as being inherently problematic?
3) This IS definitely worrisome. She is now talking about trying to make RC 51 EXclusive as opposed to INclusive. In my opinion, this approach is likely, if adopted, to ENSURE the permanent marginalization of RC51. If ONLY a few ideologically pure' sociologists need apply, then there is no need for our membership secretariat to exist. There is no interdisciplinary attraction for RC51. The focus of efforts in sociocybernetics would have to drift to other organizations leaving RC 51 as just another shrill, dwindling, politically correct entity in the vast ISA bureaucratic hierarchy.

4) I would say that anyone who is working at the level of social systems and employing a basic systems theoretic, complexity, autopoetic, cybernetic approach, is potentially at least doing useful work. the issue here is not the "purity" of their approach to the problem, but rather, the commonality of the problem (i.e. the social systems level of analysis).

5) Here is, I think the heart of the issue: Vessela seems to want to focus RC51 upon purely sociological issues, whereas I, as a political scientist, do not, and indeed cannot, share such a goal. I am concerned with the much broader canvass of applying sociocybernetics to the whole range of social-scientific inquiry. I am also concerned that our discipline remain 'scientific', that is that it ultimately produce potentially falsifiable hypotheses.

6) I would suggest that since Vessela's core area of concern is clearly a SUBSET of the broader issue of applying sociocybernetics to social scientific research, that she organize a group WITHIN the broader context of RC51 to advance her worthy goals. As opposed to her proposal which, in my opinion, illogically inverts this relationship.

All this being said, I am now as always highly impressed personally and professionally with Vessela. I apologize in advance for any (inadvertent) misunderstanding or misrepresentation of her positions which I may have committed. In summary, I advocate a broad, inclusive focus for RC51. As an interdisciplinary member (my Ph.D. is in political science) I can do nothing else and still justify my continuing membership in the group.
 

Rejoinder by Vessela Misheva:

1) Don't worry! You and I are in one and the same group. When I talk about sociology, I mean social science (socio-logy), as the term implies. My main point concerned the differences between the Logos of the natural sciences and that of the social sciences; between the metaphysical Logos and the social Logos; between the disciplinary Logos and the interdisciplinary Logos; between the individual Logos and the collective Logos.

The nature of the "social Logos" is to be a "double Logos," and its reason is nothing less than the relationship between two reasons. This is why sociology (or social science) is a "double philosophy" that presupposes a particular kind of thinking. Is it then illogical that the double reason of sociologists (social scientists) have the single reason of the philosopher as only one of its components?

What one calls this "double philosophy" is a matter of preference. I call it sociology. I conceptualize the difference between these two types of Logos in the most general terms as the difference between philosophy and sociology. But I never had in mind sociology as a separate scientific discipline with its own methods and object, or "issues," as you put it. I think of sociology (social science) as being characterised by its particular observation position. A possible source of misunderstanding in this regard comes from the fact that "sociology" in North America has a somewhat different meaning that is based on a particular institutional status.

2) This last point indicates an important problem that we, as AN INTERDISCIPLINARY GROUP, must deal with, namely, the elaboration of a common language to make our communication more efficient. We will otherwise end up as those unhappy builders of the tower of Babel, who had no choice but to abandon what they were doing and scatter to the far corners of the world.

3) I think that your idea about a "group ideology" is very interesting. Why not? Along with the discussion about "what is sociocybernetics," let's raise the question of the "group ideology," which should be defined as "interdisciplinary." In this respect, please do understand my "ideologically pure sociologist" as the person with an interdisciplinary mode of thinking.

4) One thing in your letter that does worry me, however, is that you think of "falsification" as a criterion for the scientific character of science in general. If you really believe that this is the case, if you believe that the criteria applied for evaluating knowledge in the natural and the social sciences are the same, then perhaps the differences between our positions only seem to be minor and negligible. I am convinced that different criteria apply to the natural and social sciences and, moreover, that philosophers should not apply their criteria for truthfulness to the whole of science. Sociological knowledge (or the knowledge of the social sciences) has its own specificity, and "truth" and "objectivity" have a different meaning in respect to it. I personally respect Popper as a philosopher of the natural sciences, but I do not believe that he was an expert concerning the development of the social sciences, which have their own qualitatively different "philosophy."

In this sense, I cannot agree that the principle of falsification is significant for the social sciences, where observations are not made by robots and the results obtained are not relevant to the abstract individual, as they are in the natural sciences.

In addition, the "falsification method" is a thoroughly disciplinary method of evaluation that is especially inappropriate when it comes to interdisciplinary knowledge. Please examine whether this principle, which you wish to apply, is consistent with your other ideas, which I appreciate very much.

In any case, Mike, if there will be organized a session in Crete such as "The Ideology of Sociocybernetics" concerning all the interesting points you raise in your letter I would gladly put my name in the list of the participants.
 

A recent summary of Mike Byron's position:

With regard to our ongoing discussions concerning the name, goals, identity, and methodology of our group, I'd like to make a few comments:

1) Name. I'm flexible regarding the name of our group. However, I do think that it should include the term "sociocybernetics." Further, I believe that our group should be inclusive of other disciplines outside of sociology (I am a political scientist myself). Thus we need to be careful not to adopt any name which appears to exclude interdisciplinary members. As there is no similar group operating in the social sciences, particularly in my own field of political science, there is a tangible *need* for an interdisciplinary (with particular regard to the social sciences) group such as ours. Let's not discourage potential interdisciplinary members by to narrow a focus in our name!
2) Goals. With regard to the goals of the group, I believe that we should exist to facilitate research, within the context of the social sciences, into the application of second-order cybernetics, complexity theory, and related approaches, to social-scientific phenomena. I'm more or less agnostic regarding distinctions between these approaches and more "traditional" systems-theoretical approaches. Basically, I think that any approach which offers *useful* insight(s) into social-scientific phenomena, are useful. Accordingly, I can't support ideologically rigid, doctrinaire, definitions of our mandate. However, as our level of analysis consists of higher-level social-scientific phenomena, approaches which work well for understanding natural level phenomena (i.e. 'inanimate' matter) are intrinsically inappropriate for analysis of social-scientific phenomena. This is because of the observation that our level of analysis is ultimately composed of matter, but is highly organized allowing for emergent social-scientific phenomena which are NOT reducible to any aggregation of lower-level, material inputs. Therefore, such techniques are outside the areas of concern for our group - not because they fail any test of ideological purity, or political correctness - but because they offer little to no explanatory utility at the level of social-scientific phenomena. Thus, I posit a single litmus test: Is the research technique appropriate for the social-scientific level of inquiry? Does the technique offer *insight* into social-scientific phenomena? If yes, then it ought to fall within the mandate of our group. If no, then by definition it should not.

3) Identity. As to the identity of our group, as I've already articulated, while we are formally constituted as an ISA research committee, we should be inclusive, and interdisciplinary. We can allow for diversity while still being unified in our common goal of comprehending social-scientific level phenomena. It is this commonality of goal which gives us *natural* as opposed to merely statutory, unity and group cohesiveness.

4) Methodology With regard to methodology, I hold that any approach which offers explanatory utility, or otherwise holds out the promise, even potentially, of obtaining deep insight(s) into social-scientific phenomenological reality, is acceptable. I personally frame my research agenda in such a manner as to allow for falsifible hypothesis testing, however, I accept that differently constituted research projects, may diverge from traditional scientific methodology. Here, my criterion for evaluating their usefulness is their ultimate ability to offer deep insight into the phenomena being studied.

Finally, in my capacity as membership coordinator, I need to understand what our resolution of these issues is, in order to how, and to whom, we should address our membership outreach efforts. We cannot advertise ourselves, until we have a reasonably clear consensus regarding who we are! Are we open, broad-based and inter-disciplinarily inclusive? What limitations and caveats, if any, apply? This must be resolved before effective membership outreach can commence.
 

Bernd Hornung (hornung@mailer.uni-marburg.de): "Answer to Vessela"

In the following, I want to make a few comments on Vessela Misheva's text "In Defense of Sociology". I appreciate and support very much her strong argument for sociology, understood as "social sciences". Some people seem to forget sometimes that we are an ISA group and not just any "Systems and Cybernetics" group. I really would have wished that we could have reached this level of (scientific) argument much earlier in the present discussion. Only at this point the discussion starts to become productive, opening new perspectives for the future.

I always understood sociology as a discipline which should be, if it is not, independent from philosophy and not "in its shadow". At the same time I am just as strongly convinced that no discipline should cut its links to philosophy. In this way I also appreciate very much Vessela's idea about "a separate group within RC51", which evidently need not be a formalized group. My own thinking goes towards a "non-sociological environment" within our group, also under the aspect that I wonder to what extent people from other disciplines may really want to become formally members of a "Sociological Association", i.e. ISA.

With the statement that the discussion whether social systems are autopoietic signifies our incompetence, I fully agree - but only in a certain way. Nevertheless I consider such a discussion as very important in order to make clear that neither Autopoietic Systems Theory (AST) nor other systems theory is a matter of simply using the fashionable labels. Instead, it is a matter of substantial argument. This leads us to the necessity of assuring better quality in our group, a topic which has shown up several times already, also in some remarks by Felix Geyer.

In another way, however, I don't agree. Possibly this because I have an understanding of sociology (and systems theory) which is somewhat different from Vessela's. This point, however, is beyond the present, rather superficial discussion about the name of our group. However, it could result in some key issues for a future research program, i.e. in issues worth being discussed in depth in our group and our congresses.

This difference of views, it seems to me and I may be wrong, may come from our different personal scientific histories. I consider Vessela as somebody fully in the tradition of Luhmann and AST. I myself, on the contrary, consider myself as a systems scientist and sociologist in the tradition of GST, Walter Buckley, and the world modelling of Forrester, Meadows, and Pestel/Mesarovic. Although having written my Ph.D. with Luhmann, I have never taken over his "approach" as a whole. I have only taken bits and pieces to be integrated into my "GST-Sociological Systems Theory". I do fully agree with Vessela, that "Sociocybernetics" is or should be a clearly sociological branch of systems theory. I also fully agree that Luhmann's "approach" is, of course, such a sociological branch of systems theory. For me, Luhmann was definitely a sociologist and to some extent I do have problems with his strong affinity to philosophy.

But also, from my view, Luhmann's systems theory is not the only "systems sociology". Precisely for this reason I think a Research Committee on "Sociocybernetics" is the perfectly necessary and appropriate place to investigate to what extent and in what way Luhmann, AST, and other approaches are or are not compatible, can learn from each other, and can advance sociological knowledge in terms of systems. I do see and share Vessela's concern about "schism", but I also think that to some extent a (though preliminary and unsatisfactory) solution has been found in sociology by accepting "pluralism" - pluralism of methodology as well as of theories.

For the time being, I think we have to accept that there is not only one "systems sociology" but several approaches. In our group, however, this should not lead to the formation of several isolated and autistic in-groups (which, I'm sure, is not at all Vessela's intention). Instead, it should lead to productive discussion, exchange, learning, and advancement of science, both of systems science and of social sciences.

This latter view, I suppose, should correspond with the concerns of Mike Byron for maintaining interdisciplinarity and for avoiding a NARROW sociological approach in favor of a wide "social science" approach. This is also essential for me.

In this way I may have also a somewhat different understanding of sociology. For me, it is (or at least should be) an empirical science (like e.g. psychology or economy). This includes a clearly marked object of investigation, i.e. society (however "society" may be defined by different sociological approaches) and human relations. As I insisted several times before, when I talk about an "empirical science" I definitely include theory, axiology, and methodology. "Empirical" also does not mean, that I consider sociology (or the social sciences in general) as being on principle the same as physics and chemistry. There is certainly a difference, and precisely with regard to this, AST becomes of major interest.

However, it is not only AST. The great challenge for a group like ours, is to work out how sociology as an empirical science fits with AST in general and Luhmann in particular AND with the older, classical hermeneutic approaches! In these issues, I suspect, AST could help us to advance.

Under such a perspective I really wish that our exchange will definitely lead us away from the, rather superficial, discussion about the name of the group to the investigation of important theoretical, methodological, and also empirical issues of sociology and the use of systems concepts in sociology.
One of these issues has already appeared in Vessela's exchange with Mike Byron, concerning "falsification". This is a point which cannot be discussed in e-mail messages. It rather requires e.g. a session at a meeting. Science being an ongoing enterprise without ever reaching definitive results, different positions, like on falsification, are legitimate. If they lead to discussion, they are even very productive. Also therefore I'm very hesitant about the idea of "group ideology". We already do have some minimal consensus as a matter of fact. This should be sufficient as an "ideology", if we take it seriously:

1. We are all scientists. This to a considerable extent sets the rules of the game.
2. We are a "Sociocybernetics and/or Systems" group. This means, whatever terminology we finally chose for our name, that non-systemic/sociocybernetic approaches are not of real interest to us.
3. We are an ISA group. ISA is a SOCIOLOGICAL association, whereby we seem to agree that OUR interests are problems in the "social sciences" rather than in a narrowly defined "sociology". I'm not quite sure, what is the view of ISA itself in this respect, but it also seems to be rather open.

The ideas expressed by Vessela Misheva and Mike Byron seem to correspond to these three "basics" which, should be sufficient already as an "ideology".

What we do need, rather than more of an "ideology", is a more specific delimitation of our field of activities and a kind of a "research program", i.e. an identification of the key issues in our field, which we consider necessary and promising to deal with, in order to advance our branch of scientific knowledge. Of course, such a "Research Program" cannot be an obligation to our members. To the members it can be only a suggestion. But it can be an obligation for the Board and our congress organizers to see that the topics of such a research program are appropriately represented in our meetings.
 

Francisco Parra-Luna (parralun@lix.intercom.es): "On second-order cybernetics and related issues"

I adore open actitudes towards scientific discussion. That is why I prefer not to mix the name of the RC with our discussions about methods, goals, points of view, etc. of the different socioscientific approaches. For me, [the priority is] first get out of the problem of the Name, and then have a scientific discussion free of any personal bias. Forgetting today the RC name, let me repeat again some ideas about sociocybernetics.

It seems clear that from Ampere (1834) going through Wiener, McCulloch/Pitts, Ashby, Couffignal, Rosnay and many others, cybernetics deals with a few fundamental concepts like control, government, regulation, deviation and efficacy. The basic goal of cybernetics is, in principle, very simple and at the same time it looks like the most essential task of any system: TO CONTROL ITS PERFORMANCE. If these controls were democratic I personally would like to be nothing but a cybernetician. But around this basic idea of cybernetics I have some observations:

a) As I said in one of my previous comments, the majority of works called sociocybernetic (let us go to our field) do not mention these essential concepts. Of course most works published under the label of Sociocybernetics deal implicitly and unavoidably with these concepts in the way Monsieur Jourdan "faisait de la prose sans le savoir" (made prose without knowing it - Moliere, Le bourgeois gentilhomme), but in this sense everything is then "cybernetics" like everything is communication or everything is words. It is sufficient to define a paper as cybernetic for it to be considered like that. It is really common to see titles of papers like : "xxx: A cybernetic point of view"; or "A Sociocybernetic approach to xxx", and when reading these papers one hardly discovers these basic concepts in the text. This seems not too serious. In my view, cybernetics is both at the top of systems theory and is only a very specialized part of it - according to their founding fathers the "part which deals with the control of the efficiency of systems". From a simple layman's point of view any social system, big or small, or any personal activity, from the president of a government to the milkman or the taxi-driver, are implied in cybernetic goals since they try to achieve what they planned. But from a scientific perspective we have to differentiate the general functions of systems looking for their normal performances, from THE SET OF SPECIALIZED AUTOMATIC MECHANISMS installed in systems with the purpose of controlling their performances. Some kind of ordering or prevalence in the study of the basic cybernetics concepts would then be unavoidable:
1) Planned Performance (the relationships between Planned Outputs and Planned Inputs);
2) Achieved Performance (achieved outputs/spent inputs:
3) The set of deviations produced;
4) Causes which originated the deviations; and
5) Reformulation of Planned Performance in an anticipatory feed-before way; in this sense I would agree with Bernard Scott when he says: "there is a concern with being seen to do "the right thing" and less of a concern with monitoring and evaluating outcomes" (1996, p.1).

2) But there is more. Avoiding these central concepts (mainly the OUTPUTS), we can avoid the complex problem of NEEDS of people and the COMPLEX SYSTEM OF VALUES which tries to satisfy these needs, and therefore we can ignore the number of physical individuals who are living in the system and waiting precisely for these Values and nothing but these Values. Bruce Buchanan and Robert Artigiani among us, could say something about that. And when we ignore the real women and men which form the system and center our attention on concepts like role, actions, communications and so on, we of course avoid (easily but spuriously) either to face the most important problems of the system, or consider that their opinions are not sufficiently relevant to modify its behavior. From this step to a rather dictatorial way of steering the system there is little distance, as we know. In my opinion, then, the discipline of Sociocybernetics must specially register and emphasize, first of all, the OUTPUTS (the system of Values both wanted and produced by the system for the benefit of its population), and that having separated Objective from Subjective Outputs); and second, carrying out this operation in a permanent search for a humanistic approach in the line of classical Systems Theory (Miller, Buckley, Bunge, Morin, Deouy, Bailey, etc.) and integrated, if possible, with a quantitative treatment of data in the line of scientific operational definitions of concepts (Lazarsfeld, Simon, Boudon, etc.).

Warning: Since it is not clear that Socicybernetics is doing that: be careful when you hear the word "Sociocybernetics"! I do not mean at all to invalidate this approach. On the contrary, in my view we should potentiate and develop it. But after cheking that the NEEDS (objective and subjective) of the population are among the operational variables of the system, together, of course, with the SYSTEM OF VALUES produced as an overall indicator of the degree of satisfaction of needs.

2. About SECOND-ORDER CYBERNETICS: In this field we should be even more careful in my opinion. The problem as we know is quite old, mainly after Berkeley (1713) and Kant(1781). In a few words: "We as humans are unable to perceive reality" or "the object we see maybe is not real and might exist only in our perception".

But we always assumed this evidence. And also that the scientific knowledge we have is valid (although provisional), once the experts in the field have certified it (Popper). From this provisional knowledge we build bridges, airplanes or computers and they usually work. According for instance to Boudon the problem of observation in science is solved through what he calls "intersubjective agreement among experts" - i.e., most physicists agree about the compatibility of the classical law of gravity (Newton) with the law of relativity (Einstein). Both are valid. As sociologists we never should be impressed by the relativistic positions of Heisenberg, Goedel and others, since the populations and their problems and needs (if scientifically verified) can be taken as operational realities. But when the good and admirable Heinz von Foerster said - based on relativistic mechanics (the observations are relative to the observer) and quantum mechanics (the observation affects the object) - that the knowledge we get is coming from the interactive and iterative relationship between the observer and the observed object, it was clear that we are applying some kind of cybernetic procedure through observations and the feedback we get from the observed object, which modifies the next observation in an always unfinisehd process.

Consequences: From this simple evidence and with the help of some fashionable concepts taken from Biology, Cybernetics, Communication Theory and other sciences, we can find a "seam" (a gold mine) to reelaborate sentences like "We can never know the real world", "The objects and phenomena do not have an objective existence; they exist only as representations of the observer", etc. where we can doubt whether the facts we observe are real or not. Even more, we center our attention on the act of thinking about the problem, not on the problem itself. As Bernard Scott puts it when he defines the framework of second-order cybernetics: "observers communicating with observers about observing". The result is that we can spend our entire life developing constructivistic, relativistic or similar theories of knowledge from which we can never be sure that our observation is valid communicable knowledge. Is it real that women do not participate in politics proportionnally to their number in any country in the world? Is it real that 75% of the world population get only 25 % of the global GDP? Is it real that unemployment in Spain is the highest among the EU countries? Is it real that hundreds of young African emigrants have died trying to cross the Gibraltar straits because of their perception of relative poverty? Is it true that many rich countries have institutionalized bank secrecy where big amounts of black money belong to the mafias or dictators coming from underdeveloped countries? If all that is not real, I am tempted to ask myself if the computer I am writing with is a computer, or whether it is an elephant, or whether it exists only in my imagination. Fortunately, most common people perceive that the Mitch hurricane has been very real and that the populations affected need help.

RISKY HYPOTHESES:
Let me advance two hypotheses in a provocative way for the purpose of discussion:

a) FIRST HYPOTHESIS: Second Order Cybernetics re-invented a problem around 1970 which was already RAISED by Berkeley and Kant (the subjectivity of any perception of reality) and SOLVED by Popper, Russell and others through the falsability process of the scientific method. Relativisms (Heisenberg, Goedel, Eistein, etc.) should not affect the definition of social problems and they should not be relevant for sociologists, at least for the moment. This hypothesis can be somewhat elaborated:

a1) WHEN THE OBSERVER IS OUTSIDE THE OBSERVED SYSTEM
a1.1) The observer not always, or very few times, modifies the observed object. The modification is only possible when the three following circumstances appear simultaneously:
a1.1.1) if the observer communicates her/his observation
a1.1.2) if the observer has a certain degree of influence
a1.1.3) if the observed object perceives the communication
a1.2) The observed object can modify the observation made by the observer. This is true, but this problem has been always solved by the verification process of the scientific method, or by the intersubjective agreement among experts.

a2) WHEN THE OBSERVER IS INSIDE THE OBSERVED SYSTEM
a2.1) The observer can modifiy the observed system, since she/he is a part of it, but only to any relevant degree when points a1.1.1, a1.1.2 and a1.1.3 are produced simultaneously. Nevertheless, it would be necessary to elaborate a typology of observed objetcs to see the degree of change caused by the observation of the observer. F.i. if the observation I communicate to a seminar of colleagues is to inform them about how many people are in the room, the communication cannot change the number of people in the room.
a2.2) See a1.2.

b) SECOND HYPOTHESIS. Second-order cybernetics will tend to hide social problems when it denies the possibility of defining social reality. The imperialist proliferation of sentences like:
- "Objective perception is impossible....All there is to be seen is the private unique universe aroused by messages from "out there" which are richly coloured by our own imagination and knowledge - our own priverses" (Kjellman, 1996, p.11).
- "All trials to connect truth with an ontology must fail. Reflective constructivism reveals conceptual aspects we are not aware of in our everyday or scientific views. It shows the deficiency of the concept of truth as a descriptive one and as a systemic one" (Wallner, 1966, p.2)
- "In the ontological studies there is a an effort to dominate the object. But in the new approach, there is a more modest task: the fidelity to the observation where the social analysis is a process of permanent observation about the observation" (Luhmann, 1995, p.19).
- "The new cybernetics stresses and gives an epistemological foundation for science as an observer-dependent activity. The feedback and feedforward loops characterizing the 'circular' form of systems thinking are not only constructed between the objects observed but also between them and the observer". (Geyer and van der Zouwen, 1978, vol. 1).
- "The structure and the activity derived from this structure appears as dependent of the activity of the subject who defines it" (Gaines, 1978; Glanville, 1980).
- "The idea of second-order cybernetics is that science has to incorporate the role of the subject, e.g., the observer itself" (Cor van Dijkum, 1996, p. 2).
- "Only in the field of stronger second-order cybernetics does self-reference acquire the meaning - nearly identical to reflexivity - of differential characteristics of systems..." (Perez de Guzman, 1996, p.3).
AND ABOUT THE MEASUREMENT:
- "A measurement is a manipulation made by the observer of the object she/he is trying to measure. The result of the measurement process is to introduce an error in the measure." (Stern, Encyclopaedia Britannica)
- "The consequence of the measurement process is to make the activity (ontique) of the system dependent from the objectivistic (manipulative) activity of the observer." (Navarro, 1991).

My question is: How can such a set of truisms still be repeated today? Of course everything we define is coming from a personal subjective perception. Of course we can never reach the absolute truth. Of course the knowledge we get depends on our activity as observers. Of course the knowledge we have is coming from an iterative interaction with the object we observe. Of course reflexivity can be studied by second-order cybernetics since it is almost the same thing. Of course in every measure we do we can introduce a certain degree of error. Of course we can call this measure a manipulation of the object. Of course it might happen that the computer I am writing with does not exist, but [is only] in my imagination.

But, sincerely speaking, I have never considered the need of going back to these truisms myself. First, because I always assumed the unavoidable subjectivity of everything we perceive, define or measure; and second because I knew that my personal observation had to be verified by other observers as this is a common practice in scientific work.

If I am trying to describe, neasure or explain what is happening in a social system as an observer situated outside the observed system, it is because I assume two certainties:
1) that my description is going to be validated (or falsified) by my colleagues in the field; and
2) because the final description we get among all the observers (this kind of provisional 'average'), is going to be considered as valid (although provisionally), this validity is going to make it possible to introduce changes, developments or improvements into the observed systems for the benefit of their populations. Otherwise I would not have been interested in this work.

On the contrary, if we do not believe in the possibility of describing the real world in order to change or improve it when necessary, then our elegant and privileged dilettantism is not only conservative by nature, but also immoral. We would need then a definition of second-order cybernetics that, after having eliminated most of the unnecessary or superficial references to the relationship observer/observed system, adopts the goals of knowing (heuristically) the reality and the possibility of improving it according to the desires and needs of the population.
 

Bernard Scott (bscott@dmu.ac.uk): "Sociocybernetics: What's in a name?"

Further to recent online discussions, I suggest that the name we choose for RC51 can only serve heuristic purposes. RC51 attracts interdisciplinary workers from both the social and natural sciences, prepared to look for inspiration from the transdisciplinary/metadisciplinary pursuits of cybernetics and systems science. It is evident from our discussion so far that because of our diversity of backgrounds, 100% consensus on a name is not likely and (I believe) is really of only secondary importance.

More important, though, and again evidenced by our discussions, is the need to debate the roots and goals (past, present, future) of RC51, with the aim of learning about each other and of learning together. But, again because of our diversity, it behooves us to engage in debate with a lightness of spirit, being ready to 'agree to disagree'.

As it happens, for me, the name "sociocybernetics" does the job nicely and I would be happy to have a subtitle referring to 'systems science in the social sciences'. With others, I agree that 'general systems theory' (GST) can be read as implying more than can be delivered in terms of there being an agreed GST.

There was much debate about the relations and overlaps between cybernetics and GST in the 1970's. John Rose (of what is now WOSC) organised an essay competition on that theme - I think for the journal Kybernetes. The consensus seemed to be that, in their fullest, deepest interpretations, they were indistinguishable. It became common practice for people to refer to "systems and cybernetics" or "cybernetics and systems" to show respect for the shared roots, as in WOSC (World Organization of Systems and Cybernetics) and the annual Vienna conferences organised by Robert Trappl.

I do not find the compound name 'sociocybernetics' particularly elegant but cannot think of anything better. Critical in attracting me to RC51 is the explicit inclusion of 'cybernetics' in the name. Cybernetics and GST do have different intellectual roots. In agreement with Felix Geyer, I see an epistemological depth to cybernetics, lacking in most formulations of GST.

Felix says (email of 27/10/98):
"My reasons for being in favour of our present name are:
1) There is a second-order cybernetics, but not a second-order GST. In that sense, cybernetics has renewed itself perhaps more than GST.
2) The objections against cybernetics are largely disappearing within the international sociological community.
3) These resistances were based largely on (even then only partially correct) stereotypes of the Woodstock generation of the 1970s against first-order cybernetics as being unfit to tackle the subtle complexities of the social sciences... Nowadays, these resistances are certainly not manifested by those more or less acquainted with the principles of second-order cyberneticsä
4) To the extent Francisco Parra-Luna is right in describing an existing negative image of sociocybernetics, I consider it our task as a group to make clear that sociocybernetics is a new and fertile approach to the social sciences...."

I thank Francisco for his very scholarly overview of the "systems" community (email of 21/10/98 - there's a book, there, Francisco!) but would wish there was a more balanced presentation of the 'cybernetics' story .
Elohim's recent emails (see, e.g., 20/11/98) are quite explicitly "off-balance" in this sense. On GST, he quotes very approvingly (and rightly so) from von Bertalanffy:
Von Bertalanffy: "We know and control physical forces only too well, biological forces tolerably well, and social forces not at all. If, therefore, we could have a well developed science of social systems, it would be the way out of the chaos and impending destruction of the present world" (but do note von Bertalanffy's use of the word "control"!)

However, Elohim provides a very narrow version of cybernetics: "Cybernetics as a discipline has arisen from the work carried out by Norbert Wiener. His work motivated him to contribute innovations in control engineering and communications engineering, which reached a first excellent culmination in his 1948 book, "CYBERNETICS: Control and communication in the animal and the machine"." And further: ".. GST focused on many systems phenomena ..the cybernetic model of any living and social system is useful but it is only a limited view of the related system."

I assume Elohim's perceptions of the relative merits of cybernetics and GST are not uncommon. That this view of cybernetics is too narrow is revealed by reference to the Macy conferences of the 1940's and 50's during which Wiener coined the name 'cybernetics' (and which became the title for the conferences). See the editors' introduction to von Foerster et al. (1953). Notice the scope of the subtitle. Notice, too, the concern with 'circular causality'. There is the seed of what later explicitly became 'second-order' cybernetics and 'autopoiesis': we, as observers, are 'circularly caused', autopoietic systems. Recall also the key role of Gregory Bateson in those early discussions (see also Scott, 1998a).

I would argue that all the 'great' cyberneticians have been well informed about GST. Pask, the "cybernetician's cybernetician" (as von Foerster likes to refer to him), for example, served as President of the SGSR (c. 1976). By contrast, even recent GST sources show only fragmentary awareness of cybernetic thought. As an example, see De Greene (1993). I reviewed this book for the journal Systems Research; it has contributions from many GST 'greats' but only a couple of references throughout to Maturana and von Foerster. It does, however, exhibit some welcome awareness that systems theorists should accept responsibility for the policies pursued by their 'clients' (industry, government) but not quite as clearly, directly and profoundly as in, say, Von Foerster (1993).

Since composing the above, I've had the chance to read Vessela Misheva's recent emails re RC51's name (8/10/98, 28/10/98). I agree our area is 'emergent' so (as noted above) I do not expect consensus. I do like the emphasis on the future, action orientation of RC51. I found the discussion of sociology fascinating (yes, I am here to learn), particularly the concept of sociology's 'double logos'. I see a parallel here with the distinction between first and second order cybernetics (though this may be a simplification of Vessela's concepts).

First order study is of 'observed systems', so yes, we may deploy the research paradigms of the natural sciences and seek 'falsification' of hypotheses. I think there is a vitally important place for observation and measurement and axiology (much of my 'day job' is concerned with measuring the performance of educational systems).

However, all this should take place under the rubric of the second order study of 'observing systems'. First order systems are defined from the perspectives of our second order concerns and understandings. This, I think, echoes the longstanding discussions in sociology about the 'reflexive' nature of the 'social'. It is also why Gordon Pask devoted most of his mature years to the development of 'conversation theory' (Pask, 1976). It is also why I am concerned to ensure that my first order work in education is responsibly 'framed' (Scott, 1998b).

References

De Greene, K. B. (ed.) (1993). A Systems-based Approach to Policymaking, Kluwer, Dordrecht.
Pask, G (1976). Conversation, Cognition and Learning, Elsevier, Amsterdam.
Scott, B (1998a). "Simplifying the complex: the case for cybernetics", presented at the World Congress of Sociology, Montreal, July, 1998, extended abstract in the proceedings.
Scott, B (1998b). "The role of Higher Education in understanding and achieving sustainable development: lessons from sociocybernetics", presented at the World Congress of Sociology, Montreal, July, 1998.
Von Foerster, H., Mead, M., and Teuber, H. L. (1953). Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems, Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, New York.
Von Foerster, H. (1993) "Ethics and second-order cybernetics". Psychiatria Danubia, 5, 1-2, 40-46.
 

Richard Lee (rlee@binghamton.edu): "Dilemmas of identity"

The recent discussions centering on the name to be adopted for Research Committee 51 of the International Sociological Association and thus, in the larger sense, concerning the identity of the group, are symptomatic of the situation of the social sciences as a whole in the late twentieth century. We are facing two related dilemmas: one, of subject matter, or rather of the object of our analyses; and two, of approach, that is, of our theoretical/methodological models.

Intellectually, both "sociocybernetics" and "social systems theory" allude to an arena of human interaction or relations, and of course, institutionally, RC51 is a subgroup of a scholarly association whose very existence is premised on commonly accepted boundaries separating the social science disciplines. These disciplines, and the university departments in which they came to be ensconced, were historically constructed in association with proprietary objects of study from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. Economics was associated with the study of the market; political science was devoted to the study of the state; and sociology was dedicated to the study of civil society. This triumvirate of present oriented, nomothetic disciplines focusing on the western or developed world was completed by the idiographic disciplines of history, which studied the past in the modern world, and anthropology and Orientalism (up until the 1960's), which studied the supposedly frozen-in-time non-west or non-modern world.

After 1945, these quite sharp institutional divisions almost immediately began to blur in the actual work work scholars did. The explosive expansion of the university system created a strong market for Ph.D.'s which in turn determined a good deal of "poaching" across disciplinary (departmental) frontiers in the search for innovative dissertation projects. Then, on the heels of decolonization and the upheavals of the 1960's, formerly excluded groups demanded and got a voice in the university community. Neither the disciplinary divisions of the social sciences nor the essentialized categories of race, gender and nation which they presumed matched the holistic manner these groups experienced the world and an intellectual defense of the divisions became increasingly difficult. Could one really expect to explain market forces apart from their political context or the cultural matrix of tastes and preferences?

Even though clear distinctions among the disciplines may be disappearing, "socio" or "social" still well describes our primary sphere of interest. Well then, can we say "so much for the first dilemma"? Intellectually, the "wide social science approach" is decidedly the trend and, institutionally, there are movements toward integration too, albeit for the most part strongly resisted at the level of university departments. Nonetheless, specifying an object of analysis which moves beyond the categories associated with the single disciplines remains problematic.

This brings us to my second dilemma, that of our theoretical/methodological models. The development of the social sciences has been characterized by a tension between more humanistic (idiographic, narrative) and more scientific (nomothetic, quantitative) modes, the palm of legitimacy tending to fall to the latter. Systems theory became influential after 1945. Whether at the micro or macro level, equilibrium was privileged over change and at the large scale, especially in work on modernization, there occurred an easy slippage from "society" to "social system" operationalized as nation-state. The emphasis was on structures defined as an ordering of elements amenable to comparative analysis. The resulting explanation of variance suggested means of effecting predictable change. But the "causal" model remained descriptive--"if A, then B" took the form of "in the presence of A, B"--and the temporal dimension was spatialized by situating the coexisting units of comparison at different points on a preconceived developmental time scale (e.g., traditional to modern).

The systems model presented a series of "stages of development" but no explanation of the mechanism(s) of change, of how one got from one stage to another. The great strength of systems theory is that it allowed us to identify "what has remained the same" over what period of time and thus establish a relevant temporal unit of analysis for an explanation of "social change". At this point the historical elements of human agency and struggle regain their significance.

I firmly believe that in our work we must hold on to both that which remains the same and allows us to recognize our social world as that of our forebears (the structural component) and that which is ever changing (the historical dimension): without stretching the point too much, exemplified in systems theory and cybernetics. That is not particularly controversial. The difficulty lies in establishing a theoretical/methodological framework to think about both at the same time. The major roadblock to the development of such a framework is the contradictory way we conceptualize "parts", whether as the "elements" of our systems/structures or the "agents" of our histories. I would suggest that we might concentrate on the (diachronic) processes reproducing over time, and defining the spatio-temporal boundaries, of the (synchronic) relational structures of the systems which form the ultimate units of our analyses. For those elements or agents that we observe are not pre-existent, transhistorical; they are constituted by these very processes .

And we do certainly make observations, so if to be scientific is to be empirical, then, of course, the social sciences are "scientific". I would simply argue for treating observations as instances of processes rather than as cases for comparison. However, are the social sciences the "same as physics and chemistry"? True, the logical positivists assimilated sociology to unified science as social behaviorism, but Dilthey premised an autonomous arena of authoritative knowledge production in the "Geisteswissenschaften" on a particular conception of psychology. ndoubtedly, there has been an effort to reproduce the predictability through theory construction based on a methodology of hypothesis testing that is the hallmark of Newtonian (Baconian-Cartesian) science in order to establish, or at least enhance, the legitimacy of the social sciences. The contemporary developments in the sciences of complexity are suggesting, however, that it is the sciences which are more like the social sciences in that most natural systems tend to be creative and unpredictable in much the same way we know social systems to be.

So, where does this leave us? As far as our name is concerned, it is an imperfect world and some of us may not be completely satisfied no matter what solution we eventually adopt. For the moment, we have much to learn from our discussions. The interchange itself is beginning to outline where our common ground lies. The "dilemmas of identity" we face in the areas of subject matter and theoretical/methodological approach amount to a questioning of some of the basic assumptions of 19th century social science. If we find a holistic view of the world more convincing than a reductionistic one, then we are likely to more freely violate the boundaries separating the disciplines (as the membership of our group bears out) and collapse proprietary groupings of objects of analysis. But is it then a "bridge too far" to question the hypothetical-nomological approach when work in complexity studies is offering new models of reality and change? I think not, especially given the way these models suggest exciting ways of reintegrating an axiological dimension (values) as integral to our work rather than as an artifact of individual commitment.
 

Contents 

The annual meeting of RC51 in Crete will be held at the convent of the Orthodox Academy of Crete in Kolimbari Chanion, May 26-May 31. The theme is "Sociocybernetic Bridges between the Past, Present and Future: Problems of Emergence and Complexity in Sustainable Systems". Kolimbari is a small Cretan town close to the sea in Western Crete (prefecture of Chania). The convent is built just at the rocky coast of a peninsula and has a long history as a religious center. The building in which the meeting will be held is located in the modern part of the whole convent complex. It is a building with all the facilities for modern congresses. The Orthodox Academy of Crete is internationally famous as a place for scientific congresses and meetings.

The town of Chania is the capital of the prefecture, and has a long tradition of political and miltary great families in the island. Chania was the private home of the greatest politician in Greece in the 19th century, Eleftherios Venizelos. The distance between Chania and Kolimbari is 28 km.; from the airport to Chania is appr. 10 km. One can take a taxi for $20-25. There is also a bus line from Chania to Kolimbari with tickets for about $5; in this case, you should take a taxi from the airport to the Chania bus terminal ($7) and from Kolimbari to the convent ($2). The itinerary for the airport to the convent is interesting and passes through many touristic Cretan villages near to the beach, including Maleme, famous from World War II.

The price for a single room is $80 per day, with three meals included; a double room is $60 per person. During the last day, May 31, an excursion will be organized in order to visit the famous archeological sites of Knossos and Festos. Knossos and Festos were the most important economic and cultural centers of the ancient Minoan civilization (2500-1400 B.C.). In both sites are ruins of ancient famous palaces. One can visit both places iin one day if one starts the excursion early morning (7 a.m.). The cost for such an excursion will be about $50 per person, guide included.

Crete is a beautiful island with high mountains, excellent beaches, and stunning gorges. One can call it the "California of Greece" because of its climate and morphology. In Crete one can still find traditional villages and many archeological sites bcause of its long history. Hopefully, for many participants the conference will be the begining of more frequent contacts with the island.

Will all those interested to participate whose participation is certain by now send a message to that effect to Richard Lee (rlee@binghamton.edu) , Philip Nicolopoulos (nikolop@phl.uoc.gr) and Felix Geyer (geyer@xs4all.nl}? This includes all those who already announced their intention to participate without as yet being certain of their participation and travel grant. They will then as soon as possible receive information about how to make reservations at the convent. You should make your own travel arrangements, and should note that on most types of tickets you can fly 15% of the distance at no extra cost. Especially if you come from afar, this might enable you to obtain a roundtrip Athens-Chania for free or for a very reducd price.

If you have not indicated your interest already, please note that accomodation at the convent is limited, and that those booking late may have to find accomodation themselves in nearby and more expensive hotels!

Zaragoza is a very good place to have a meeting, 3 hours by train to Madrid and 3,5 hours to Barcelona. It has its own airport, and by bus one can get a ticket Madrid-Zaragoza from $20. It is a city of congresses, all year round! There are many things to visit inside the city and in the immediate neighborhood. One very important place is the so-called Goya route: 25 km to the village where he was born, with a special collection of pictures. Also, there are the Pyrenees (1,5 hour by bus) or adventure sports or other beautiful and unknown places...(from Iberian cities, Roman or Arabic villages, to natural parks). So we are speaking about a touristic place, with many and different type of hotel and dormitories (from 20$ to 400$). There are more bars and pubs than in all of Sweden (for instance), and "uncountable" restaurants.

At this moment I am working on two possibilities: (i) an open congress (ii) a restricted seminar only for our RC51. I would like to organize an open Congress about "Complexity and social change" from an interdisciplinary perspective. But I think we need to discuss the subject in the board of RC51 and consider two points: 1) the financial aspects, and 2) our own preferences as RC51.

Presently, I am looking for support and sponsors. I have the probable support of city hall, probably also of Zaragoza University (classrooms, internet conections, dormitories, etc.) and maybe I will get more finnancial support from other institutions.

I hope to have the answers and all information around March 1999. If subsidies can be obtained we could contact two or three "important" people in the area of "Complexity and Social Change". For instance Prigogine (?) and Morin (?). But this is only a possibility; I will know more in three months. If we decide that we prefer a restricted seminar, only for our RC51, then we don't need anything, and do not have any problem. We then only need to agree on a date.

I am writing today to colleagues in two geographical areas: a) Latinamerica (Balsamo, Earls, Gonzalez, Parra-Esteban, Mallmann) and Japan (Imada, Ishikawa, M. Maruyama, and T. Maruyama) in order to find out the possibilities or organizing a conference there before the Brisbane Congress. It could be good and convenient for the development of our RC not to excessively center our activities in Europe, but in other areas according with globalization tendencies. I hope to have some news soon and I will tell you if there are some positive answers.

Although the 15th World Congress of Sociology in Brisbane, Australia, is still more than three years away, our board is already looking for a person to fulfil the one board position that is still vacant: session coordinator of our RC51 sessions at this this congress.

Perhaps no one has come forward up till now to volunteer for this function because it is assumed to be a very difficult and time-consuming one. While it would be false to say that nothing is further from the truth, the session coordinator has a function that definitely should not be too heavy if the session organizers do their job properly, as they have done for the Montreal World Congress. Moreover, the secretary can and will certainly assist the session coordinator whenever possible.

The tasks of the session coordinator include the following:
1) To make definitive arrangements, after consultation with the other board members, with the persons proposing to organize a session, on the basis of their proposals for session themes;
2) To find session organizers who are interested in certain paper proposals that either are not already directed to one of the session organizers, but to the session coordinator, or are rejected by the session organizers they are sent to;
3) To keep in intensive contact with the session organizers, especially as the congress approaches, and see to it that they receive 250-word abstracts and 1000-word abridged papers from the paper proposers in time to submit to the abstracts committee whose members will be selected by the board;
4) To see to it that the abstracts committee - to be formed upon invitation by the board - judges all abstracts, and to convey the resulting judgments to the session organizers concerned,eventually advising them to refuse certain papers, or to accept them as contributed papers only.
5) To see to it that the session organizers send in the abstracts of their session, typed out on ISA-provided forms, and signed by them for approval, to the congress organization in time for reproduction in the Sociological Abstracts special World Congress issue; and that they take care that their session participants register in time for the congress - since otherwise their abstracts will NOT be included;
6) To see to it that the session organizers receive the full papers on time before the congress;
7) To send the full session program to the congress organization in time to be printed in the World Congress program book;
8) To assist the session organizers, to the extent necessary to arrange for hotel accomodation for themselves and their participants.

As can be gleaned from the above task description, there is relatively little the session coordinator needs to do except coordinate the session organizers, and see to it that things are done on time. The specific deadlines will obviously be announced only later. An important condition, for session coordinator and session organizers alike, is that they are reasonably sure they can obtain the funds to make it to Australia. If anyone is potentially interested in this function, but wants more detailed information, please contact Felix Geyer at either geyer@xs4all.nl or geyer@wins.uva.nl.

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We have received a good number of "clicks" (visits), more than 800 since June 1998. I consider our website as an open area to work, to think and to create. We now have the permission to increase the number of "megabytes" without any problems. Therefore, we need to generate information, papers, links... but since Montreal we have not uploaded any new information. My plans for further elaboration of the website are to create a Spanish version (if someone wants to translate into other languages I will be very interested!!) and to bring news about our group, interchanges between us, plus another site, ordered by topic, with personal e-mails. The main idea is to use our website as a meeting point and as a public window to visit our work as RC51.

And if we consider this feasible, we could create a new electronic publication on sociocybernetics without restrictions of space. Now I have got the permission to do it, but we need to create the information, articles, papers, etc. Thus, our website will develop into a new area to disseminate our work and to offer different and interdisciplinary reflections about our world. We need to do it!! I offer my personal work as web-administrator to maintain our website.

Please have a look at our Zaragoza website (http://www.unizar.es/sociocybernetics) and let us know if you have in the meantime acquired a website address which is not yet mentioned there.
Two new website addresses: Francisco Entrena: http://www.ugr.es/~fentrena/ and Matthias Rauterberg, now in the Netherlands: http://www.tue.nl/ipo/.

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As you will know, our membership drive is coordinated by Mike Byron (mpbyron1@home.com), while regional coordinator Mike Terpstra (mterp@earthlink.net) is responsiblefor North America, Galin Gornev (gornev@bgcict.acad.bg) for Eastern Europe and Russia, and Torcuato Perez de Guzman (torcuato@uv.es) for the Latin World. They hope to report many new members in the next issue of our Newsletter, and of course would appreciate your help to accomplish this goal. Therefore, if you have anyone in your environment who is potentially interested to become an RC51 member (and even better: also an ISA member!) please let both Mike Byron and your regional coordinator (if any in your area) know. Those concerned will then receive invitations and the necessary forms. For those who are already certain they want to become RC51 members, it is also possible to sign up electronically on our Zaragoza website and send the membership form and questionnaire directly to RC51 secretary Richard Lee.. Signing up for ISA membership is also possible at the ISA website: http://www.ucm.es/OTROS/isa/members.htm. Your cooperation in acquiring new members will be highly appreciated!

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Last but not least, there is "Sociocybernet", an up till now unmoderated discussion list for discussions between our members that was already announced in our last Newsletter. It was opened on May 20, even earlier than our Zaragoza website which went into operation by mid-June. However, in the busy months before the Montreal World Congress, its creation went relatively unnoticed, and presently only some 50 out of ... members have subsribed to it.

Especially since this discussion list is an excellent vehicle for involvement in the discussions around our name, the borders of our field, our specific identity, etc., you are encouraged to sign up for this list, by sending an email to "listserv@nic.surfnet.nl" with in the body of the message the following text, without brackets!:
subscribe sociocybernet [your first name] [your last name].
For example:
subscribe sociocybernet Kenneth Bailey

You will then receive a short manual how to become active on this list, and what rules to observe. The main rule is to quote in the subject line the subject you are reacting to. If you want to start a discussion about a new subject, you should give it a short title in the subject line of your message yourself, which others reacting to your message should then repeat. This way, multiple discussions can go on simultaneously, and you can simply delete messages about subjects you are not interested in. Once you have subscribed to the list, you can then send messages to the list, located at sociocybernet@nic.surfnet.nl. Please be aware that your messages will be sent to all other subscribers! Therefore, if you want to send a reaction to a specific person, you should use that person's email address. We do not want to put all RC51 members on the list automatically, since many of you may not be interested to participate. Therefore, you should subscribe yourself in the way indicated above.

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Theory bends - redwoods survive by bending rather than resisting - unchanged but flexible. Who are Luhmannians? Shades of interpretation exist; there can be no anointed orthodoxy since he thought efforts to pin things down were inconsequential to the use or study of his ideas.

As we continue to study his body of work, we might pause to reflect on the shades of meaning that are ascribed to his interpreters. The following is a brief description of my perspective on the current trends in the study of Luhmann's work. It may be classified as ruminations about where theory fits into sociocybernetics.

It is my observation that there are three approaches to Niklas Luhmann's theoretical work: the Orthodox, the Practical, and the Neo-Luhmannian. One can readily find the orthodox cluster holding forth on the German language Luhmann ListServe. The practical congregate within SOIS (Self-Organization of the Information Society). The Neo-Luhmannians are a minority among social systems organizations.

The orthodox group believes that theories of how society is constructed cannot be conserved or destroyed. Validity is either preserved or lost; validity is produced by one's understanding of Luhmann's theory through scientific communication or some prescribed format. If it goes beyond methodological application, it may be destroyed. [1] The idea of application is not linear, but more complex - with nested hierarchies and strange loops - an evolution of theory which can't be duplicated outside of its specific time and place. As theory is linked with practical application, the theory doesn't change but the applications do, depending on the circumstances of time and place.[2]

The practical theorists are busy applying the theoretical underpinnings of Luhmann's work. Such theoretical practitioners challenge some of the core theoretical concepts of Luhmann's theory. For example, Loet Leydesdorff states that Luhmann does not distinguish sufficiently between the epistemological analysis of functional binary [true/false options] categories and the methodological model.[3] Also, Felix Geyer found difficulties in using Luhmann's concepts of elemental reproduction and self-identification when applying theoretical principles of internal complexity as it built up in the course of a lifetime. Geyer attempted to demonstrate that this accumulation is the result of the person's goal-dependent efforts to reduce the complexity of his environment.[4]

Neo-Luhmannians are loyalists, at least for the time being, to the tenets of differentiation and self-reference. They are either neophytes striving to contribute to the advancement of Luhmann's constructs or they have not given up pursuing what others have considered theoretical "dead ends." A Neo-Luhmannian approach would not expand on Luhmann's theoretical explanation of complexity reduction. Instead, the neo-approach provides an organizational perspective of the practical use of theory in the analysis of management.[5] I consider myself a Neo-Luhmannian. I use Luhmann's theory to help analyze doctor-patient dialogues. When applying Luhmann's theory to analysis, I had difficulties identifying the differences between system and environment.[6] With this type of analysis, I am able to arrive at a conclusion that is neither purely linguistic nor focused on the subjectivity of either of the participants. For these reasons, I continue to pursue a practical understanding of double contingency. The difficulty in identifying the subject for analysis and a strong belief in the potential of Luhmann theoretic in developing methodology motivates me toward a fuller knowledge of what is at the theoretical core: double contingency.

Since it is my intent to stimulate discussion and advance the understanding of Luhmann's theory, I make the following generalization: there are three different answers to a question. Each answer depends on what particular approach is taken to an understanding of Luhmann, depending on whether one is Orthodox, Practical, or a Neo-Luhmannian.

An orthodox stance might approach the topic acknowledging and advocating the theory's strong points, such as a well equipped epistemological arsenal, strong rationale for one's observation results, and theory with a high measure of internal homogeneity. The expectation placed on the theory requires that the scientist assume an intellectual role, thus clearing up the illusions of modern trends. Therefore, the significance of the Luhmann/Habermas debate is that Luhmann was able to dispel the modern "normative" myth. The central thrust of the practical Luhmannian is the intellectual reconciliation between competing theoretic. This leads to practical models that have a foundational base in Luhmann's theory but take exception to pivotal constructs that limit empirical verification. One practical approach suggests a solution to a perceived theoretical deficit between an epistemological analysis of communication and the development of a communication model. Another practitioner bridges the gap between the characteristics of complexity and the perceived difficulty in identifying internal complexity by fortifying a theory of alienation.

The Neo-Luhmannians are torn between a rigid adherence of the orthodox and the freedom enjoyed by the practical artisan. The neo-theorists build from within the Luhmannian sphere. Often this process cannot be empirically verified nor does it produce analytical models. Strategy replaces analysis and description assumes a more global and longitudinal quality.

There are three different perspectives to the question: what role does "double contingency" have in Habermas's and Luhmann's theory of communication? The orthodox position reargues the Luhmannian position, striving to clarify the explanation. Luhmann does a good job of clearing up misconceptions in the revised author's preface to the English translation of Soziale Systeme, "Instead of a Preface to the English Edition: On the Concepts 'Subject' and 'Action.'"[7] The practical approach revisits the argument on "double contingency" from a position suggesting a revision or "deconstruction"[8] of the life world. An example of this approach is seen in the following statement. "The communication system has continuously to be kept 'alive': These dynamics, however, are endogenous to the system, since otherwise the system cannot adapt to its surrounding complexities."[9] A Neo-Luhmannian response returns to the source of the argument in order to develop an updated approach to the problem. My example of this type of approach is my observation that an argument exists for a Kantian transcendental self where the self does not acquire self-knowledge through self-awareness.[10] Luhmann quotes G.H. Mead in a footnote to the following statement: "The theory of modalities seems to offer a rational model for the fact that 'meaning' is always something which preserves its self-identity by referring explicitly to horizons of further exploration and modification."[11] Luhmann's quotation of Mead is a further elaboration on the topic: "George Herbert Mead (1932, p. 26)[12] lights upon this metaphor without mentioning Husserl: 'There is nothing transcendent about this powerlessness of our minds to exhaust any situation. Any advance which makes toward greater knowledge simply extends the horizon of experience; but all remains within conceivable experience.'" The metaphor Luhmann mentions in reference to Mead, is horizons. It is my understanding that Luhmann drew heavily from Mead's idea of communication that involves our original problem: "'taking the role of the other' and 'the ability to be the other at the same time that he is himself.'" The solution to the paradoxical statement, understanding the same by the same," is found in one of the tenets of the orthodox: Luhmann's theory has a high measure of internal homogeneity. In our case, the logic that leads our thinking on social systems from "double contingency" to "self-reference"[13] is consistent and uniform.

Since we no longer can ask Luhmann what he thought about certain topics, it seems that we will continue to examine his legacy in light of our own interests. The continuing efforts to apply his seminal work will result in a infinite number of variations and, by default, an equal number of debates among students of his theory.

Notes:
1."Theorieinflationierung (war: Die Bewahrung der Theorie)" 13 May 1998 LUHMANN@LISTSERV.GMD.DE msg01165 (14 May 1998).
2. Fuchs, P, 045335335-0001@T-ONLINE.DE"Theorieinflationierung (war: Die Bewahrung der Theorie)" 14 May, 1998
LUHMANN@LISTSERV.GMD.DEmsg01173 (15 May, 1998).
3. Leydesdorff, L., 1998. "Luhmann, Habermas, and the Theory of Communication." Draft version, World Congress of Sociology, Montreal, July/August 1998), http://www.chem.uva.nl/sts/loet/montreal.htm
4. Geyer, R.F., (1980). Alienation theories: A general systems approach. New York: Pergamon Press.
5. Ahlemeyer, H. 1998. (ISYS Institute of Systemic Social Research, Muenster, Germany), "Management by Complexity - Redundancy and Variety in Organizations." Paper submitted for presentation at session 4 of RC 51 at the XIVth ISA World Congress of Sociology, Montreal.
6. Terpstra, M. 1997. Niklas Luhmann: A theoretical illustration of his definition of differentiation. Dissertation, Fielding Institute, Santa Barbara, California.
7. Luhmann, N. (1991). Instead of a preface to the English edition: On the concepts "subject" and "action." In N. Luhmann, (1995), Social systems. (J. Bednarz, Jr., & D. Baecker, Trans.). Stanford: Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1984).
8. A philosophical movement and theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth, asserts that words can only refer to other words, and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings: "In deconstruction, the critic claims there is no meaning to be found in the actual text, but only in the various, often mutually irreconcilable, 'virtual texts' constructed by readers in their search for meaning" (Rebecca Goldstein). The American Heritage, Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition, copyright ® 1992 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Electronic version licensed from InfoSoft International, Inc. All rights reserved.
9. Just before making this statement, Leydesdorff says: "Although Luhmann (1984) acknowledged the possibility of misunderstanding, his theory has not left sufficient room for the grey shades of mixtures of misunderstanding and understanding that generate uncertainties and, in my opinion, propel the communication process." (p.14, Leydesdorff, L, 1998. "Luhmann, Habermas, and the Theory of Communication." Draft version, World Congress of Sociology, Montreal, July/August 1998).
10. Kitcher, P. (1982). Kant on self-identity. The Philosophical Review, 61(1).
11. Luhmann, N. (1982). The Differentiation of society. (S. Holmes, & C. Larmore, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 277-278.
12. Luhmann takes his quote of G.H. Mead from: Mead, George Herbert 1918. "The Psychology of Punitive Justice." American Journal of Sociology 23:557-602.
13. In Luhmann's 1982 book, The Differentiation of Society, he introduces the concept of self-reference with the term self-thematization. The last chapter of the book is "The Self-Thematization of Society: A Sociological Perspectifve on the Concept of Reflection."

Please send your comments on this article, if any, to Mike Terpstra: (mterp@earthlink.net).

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When I became one of two volunteers to report on new developments relevant to sociocybernetics, I did not realise what an awesome task this would be. Sociocybernetics is a vast field concerned more with systemic methodology than a well-defined domain of human activity. This was one reason I suggested including non-social science within 'relevant development'. Think of the influence the biology of autopoiesis or the physics of chaos and complexity and chaos have had on social systemic thinking, for example.

As I contemplate where to place the boundaries of my task, it springs to mind that the prolonged and animated discussion about the name of our RC reflects this very dilemma. I doubt if this can ever be resolved once and for all. The question of where we, as an RC, define ourselves and our boundaries extends way beyond debates about 'cybernetics vs. systems theory'. Both traditions have good and bad points. But then so did Galileo, Darwin and almost everyone! No, a more important question is whether a systemic approach can legitimately limit itself to the social sphere, as historically defined by the less systemic social science that our group has emerged to challenge. This is another reason it is important to turn and look outside the social sciences, as strictly defined. If we do not, we will remain unaware of many systemic developments and activities out there that have a bearing on what we do.

The main point for me is that sociocybernetics is about human relationships in all their systemic complexity. This is the main criterion I shall be using in selecting relevant developments. In a classical Koestlerian sense, human systems are holons. They have inside and outside, individual and collective dimensions. A systemic perspective necessitates looking at all of them and their interrelations. And this means looking at psychological and ecological, as well as social, science. Our psyches, after all, influence our collective cultural values and beliefs which, in turn, impinge on the sustainability of our ecological life-support systems.

In the public eye, the field of sustainability and sustainable development is mainly associated with biology, ecology and economics. Yet none of these get to the root of the problem - human values, meanings, beliefs and motivations. The causes are cultural and psychological. A systemic social science should be playing a key role in theorising the human roots of unsustainability - the relatedness between human values and motivations, on the one hand, and socio-ecological degradation, on the other. Not to do so could have dire consequences as sustainability science will continue to focus on symptoms rather than underlying causes.

The one-time president of the ISSS, Sir Geoffrey Vickers, did much to clarify the various fundamental dimensions of human systems, especially in articulating how the 'internal' dimensions of meanings and values relate to the 'external' dimensions of behaviour and social activity. There is still a great deal to learn - or perhaps to remember - from his writings, eg. his 'Value Systems and Social Process' and the wonderful title, 'Freedom in a Rocking Boat'.

Similiar clarification has been offered more recently by the philosopher Ken Wilber through his 'four quadrants' schema - individual, collective, inner and outer. An individual human being would be seen in this schema in the following way. The individual-outer dimension is the physical body, its cells and so on, and their behaviour. Individual-inner is the psychological world of drives, experiences, intentionality, personal meanings and values, etc. However, meanings and values do not arise spontaneously. They are gleaned from the inner-collective context - the domain of cultural beliefs, values, interpretative frameworks, etc, through which we make sense of the world and our experiences. To paraphrase Einstein - experience without meaning is blind. Meaning without experience is lame. But cultural beliefs, meanings and values cannot be seen, only their outward effects can.

More on Wilber's four quadrants can be found in his books 'A Brief History of Everything' and 'Sex, Ecology and Spirituality'. As a research group in social science, RC51 is relatively unique - and progressive - in grasping the systemic nettle. In comparison with the natural and physical sciences, the social sciences have been painfully slow in this respect. A systemic human science is desperately important for reasons mentioned above regarding sustainability. In developing it, we need to be in dialogue with other systemic scientists - ecologists, biologists and others - who are also seeking to make the world a better place.

I have already alluded to some of the criteria I will be using to decide on developments relevant to sociocybernetics. I shall be taking a 'Janus-headed' approach, viewing social science and social systems as holons. Anything else would not be conducive to maintaining a systemic perspective. This means staying in touch with the person, issues of experience and subjectivity; and with the dimensions of collective values and meanings which are constitutive of the social and ecological world.

In future reports, I shall, amongst other things, be outlining relevant areas such as the so-called 'science of qualities' or 'Goethean science' and 'third order cybernetics'. If any members encounter new developments that you think should be included, I would be pleased to receive news about them at the email or address below. Other comments are always welcome too. I wish all members a happy, fulfilling and systemic New Year.

Notes:
1) Sir Geoffrey Vickers (1968) Value Systems and Social Process, London: Tavistock Publications
2) Sir Geoffrey Vickers (1972) Freedom in a Rocking Boat: Changing Values in an Unstable Society, London: Pelican.
3) Ken Wilber (1996) A Brief History of Everything, Dublin: Gill and Macmillan
4) Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology and Spirituality

The editors hope there will be some book reviews in the next Newsletter issue. Philip Nicolopoulos will in principle contribute a book review on the volumes with the proceedings of the 1996 Bucharest congress. However, as Philip's mother was severely ill, while his father just died, there was no time to have this review ready for the present issue, while also there was no opportunity for discussion between the two board members responsible for book reviews, Philip and Bernard Scott. Here now follows a short piece by Bernard about how he intends to fulfil his task:

"Philip Nikolopolos and I intend to contact publishers for information about books that members of RC51 would be invited to review. We also invite members of RC51 to recommend items for review, these could include books, journals, individual papers, including websites and online publications.

Because of our different disciplinary backgrounds, reviews do not have to be of 'new' material - they could be of older, 'key' texts or a 'key' authors' work with the aim of informing one another about major themes in different disciplinary areas. This would be in the 'holistic' spirit of sociocybernetics and could also inform our practical concerns with local and global issues.

So, if you have a favourite text or website that you think RC51 members would find interesting, please let us know."

All of you should just have received the announcement of the 11th International Congress of Cybernetics and Systems, the successor to our Bucharest conference The Eleventh Congress of the World Organisation of Cybernetics and Systems will be held in Brunel University, Uxbridge (West London) during 23-27 August 1999.

The deadline for submission of abstracts of papers (ca. 80 words) for RC51 members has been extended from January 15 until January 31. Correspondence should be addressed to: Professor R. Vallee, Director-General WOSC, 2, Rue de Vouille, 75015 PARIS, FRANCE
Tel & fax: +33.1.45 33 62 46 (unfortunately no email address!).
If you are interested to participate in this congress:
- please fax your 80-word abstract to prof. Vallee before January 31
- please also email it to Felix Geyer (geyer@xs4all.nl)
- please mention "Sociocybernetics Section".

Whether indeed a Sociocybernetics Section will be organized will depend on how many of you are interested. I will let you know by the end of this month whether there will indeed be a Sociocybernetics section. If not, your paper will be put in one of the other sessions.

The congress fee is 50 pound sterling if you deliver a paper, 80 pound sterling if you do not. There will be cheap accomodation in the student dormitories at Brunel University.There is a May 15 deadline for abridged papers of maximum 600 words, which will be published after the congress; the papers themselves will not be published.

For further details see the website:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/AlexAndrew/wosc.htm
and particularly the page:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/AlexAndrew/cngrs99.htm

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The composition of our new board, elected partially already in Montreal, and subsequently by mail ballot, is as follows. If you receive this as a Word7 file, you can contact the board member concerned directly by clicking on the email address.

President: Bernd Hornung, hornung@mailer.uni-marburg.de
Vice-president: Vessela Misheva, Vessela.Misheva@soc.uu.se
Past president: Kenneth Bailey, kbailey@soc.ucla.edu
Secretary: Richard Lee, rlee@binghamton.edu
Newsletter editors: Felix Geyer, geyer@xs4all.nl and Cor van Dijkum, c.vandijkum@fsw.ruu.nl
Book review editors: Philip Nicolopoulos, nikolop@phl.uoc.gr and Bernard Scott, scott@dmu.ac.uk
Membership drive: Mike Byron , mpbyron1@home.com (overall coordinator),
Galin Gornev, gornev@bgcict.acad.bg (EasternEurope and Russia),
Torcuato Perez de Guzman, torcuato@uv.es (Latin World, also scientific liaison)
Mike Terpstra, mterp@earthlink.net (North America)
Editors for new developments within and outside of the social sciences:
Tessaleno Devezas, tessad@demnet2.ubi.pt
Paul Maiteny, GrubbUK@aol.com
Conferences: Francisco Parra-Luna, parralun@lix.intercom.es (overall coordinator and 2001 annual meeting),
Philip Nicolopoulos, nikolop@phl.uoc.gr (1999 annual meeting in Kolimbari, Crete, Greece),
Chaime Marcuello, chaime@posta.unizar.es (2000 annual meeing in Zaragoza,Spain)
Francisco Parra-Luna, parralun@lix.intercom.es (2001 annual meeting, location as yet unknown, possibly in Latin America),
Webmaster: Chaime Marcuello, chaime@posta.unizar.es (2000 annual meeting in Zaragoza, Spain)

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