Niklas Luhmann, Differentiation, in Theory of Society
Michael G. Heller
Chapter 4 Differentiation System Differentiation Since its inception, sociology has been concerned with differentiation. The term alone deserves attention. It stands for the unity (or establishment of the unity) of difference. Older societies, too, had naturally observed differences; they distinguished between town dwellers and country dwellers, between nobles and peasants, between the members of one family and those of another. But they were satisfied to note the differing qualities of beings and ways of life and to form corresponding expectations, as they also did in dealing with things.
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Chapter 4 Differentiation

System Differentiation

Since its inception, sociology has been concerned with differentiation. The term alone deserves attention. It stands for the unity (or establishment of the unity) of difference. Older societies, too, had naturally observed differences; they distinguished between town dwellers and country dwellers, between nobles and peasants, between the members of one family and those of another. But they were satisfied to note the differing qualities of beings and ways of life and to form corresponding expectations, as they also did in dealing with things.

The concept of differentiation allowed a more abstract approach, and this step toward abstraction is likely to have been caused by the nineteenth-century tendency to see unities and differences as the outcome of processes—whether of evolutionary developments or (as in the case of politically united “nations”) of purposive action.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, this concept of differentiation made it possible to switch from theories of progress to structural analysis, while nevertheless adopting the economist’s belief in the productiveness of the division of labor.

Talcott Parsons’s general theory of the action system still built on this concept, which offered a key formula both for analyzing development (increasing differentiation) and for explaining modern individualism as the result of role differentiation.

It led … Émile Durkheim to reflect on changes in the forms of moral solidarity, and Max Weber to develop his concept of the rationalization of different orders of life such as religion, the economy, politics, and eroticism.

The dominance of the differentiation concept proves useful precisely because it does not exclude seemingly disparate theoretical approaches—to development, to individuality, to value criteria—but rather gives access to them.

In sum, differentiation is necessary to maintain cohesion under conditions of growth.

The differentiation concept enabled modern society to admire and criticize itself. It could regard itself as the irreversible outcome of history and look to the future with a great deal of skepticism. …

… In many other regards, too, systems theory offers a greater wealth of logical structure than the tradition of thinking in wholes and parts. It can (and must), for example, distinguish between system-environment relations and system-system relations (tradition knows only the latter). Only with the distinction between system and environment does the system capture the unity of the world or the unity of the comprehensive system, and it does so by means of a self-referential distinction.

With system-system relations (e.g., between family and school) it captures only segments of the world or of society. However, it is this very segmentariness that makes it possible to observe the given other system as system-in-its-own-environment and hence to reconstruct the world or society from the perspective of observing observations.

In the environment of other systems, the system that observes them is also to be found. …

… This is true, for example, of relations between villagers in segmentary societies, and for relations between castes or estates of birth in hierarchical orders, and, in much more complex and complicated forms, also of relations between the functional systems of modern society. What functions as structural coupling in relations between subsystems is, however, also a structure of the comprehensive system of society.

This justifies describing societal systems above all in terms of their form of differentiation, for this is the form of structure formation that determines and limits what structural couplings between sub-systems are possible.

Finally, switching from the whole-part schema to the system-environment schema changes the value of the “integration” concept. In old European thinking, there was no special term for this, for integration of the parts was presupposed in the wholeness of the whole as ordinata concordia [well-ordered concord], and expressed with regard to single phenomena as their nature or essence.

Classical sociology reformulated the problem as a more or less regular relationship between differentiation and integration. Differentiation, it was claimed, could not be carried to the extreme of complete indifference. … Parsons put it this way: “Since these differences are conceived to have emerged by a process of change in a system … the presumption is that the differentiated parts are comparable in the sense of being systematically related to each other, both because they still belong within the same system and, through their interrelations, to their antecedents”.

The concept of integration is, however, mostly left undefined, and, as critics have pointed out, ambiguous. Inadequately considered premises for consensus often feed into the empirical conditions for integration. As a result, the term continues to be used to express perspectives of unity or even expectations of solidarity and to urge appropriate attitudes—in the old European style!

The historical process is described as one of emanation: out of homogeneity comes heterogeneity, and heterogeneity replaces homogeneity by requiring differentiation and integration at the same time.

Under such circumstances, mobility is often claimed to assume the function of integration, and “mobilization” is therefore considered one of the crucial recipes for modernization policy in developing countries (as long as the chaotic consequences of migration and urbanization do not demonstrate the contrary).

However, a normative concept that promotes or at least approves of integration must face growing opposition in societies that are becoming more complex. Retaining such a concept imposes paradoxical or tautological, self-implicative formulations. Communication of the precept (and how else is it to become reality?) will provoke more “noes” than “yesses”, so that the hope of integration finally leads to rejection of the society in which one lives. What then?

To avoid such overinterpretation, I take integration to mean no more than reduction in the degrees of freedom of subsystems due to the external boundaries of the societal system and the internal environment of this system they define. …

… Unlike the societal system, its subsystems have two environments: that external to society and that internal to society. So defined, integration is neither a value-laden concept nor “better” than disintegration. Nor does it refer to the “unity” of the differentiated system (which, purely in terms of conceptual logic, follows from the fact that, although there can be more or less integration, there cannot be more or less unity).

Integration is hence not commitment to a unity perspective, let alone a matter of “obedience” on the part of subsystems to central authorities. It lies, not in the relation of “parts” to the “whole,” but in the shifting, also historically variable adjustment of subsystems to one another.

Degrees of freedom can be restricted by the conditions of cooperation, but even more strongly by conflict. The concept is therefore not directly concerned with the difference between cooperation and conflict: it is superordinate to this distinction.

The problem of conflict is the excessive integration of subsystems, which mobilize more and more resources for the dispute, withdrawing them from other fields; and the problem of a complex society is then to ensure sufficient disintegration.

Such restriction can develop where connections come into play … On the other hand, it makes any change to the “tacit collective structure,” as it is often called, more difficult. Accidents or failures are often needed to produce awareness that reliance had been placed on coordination that had not necessarily occurred.

If we look into the conditions for integration/disintegration, we ultimately encounter a temporal relation. For everything that happens (if considered from a temporal point of view) happens simultaneously. The consequence is, first, that simultaneous events cannot mutually influence or control one another; for causality requires a time difference between cause and effect, hence a crossing of the temporal boundaries of what happens simultaneously.

On the other hand, the unity of an event, an accident, an action, an eclipse of the sun, or a thunderstorm can take very different forms depending on the interests of observers. It is not necessary to heed system boundaries. Tabling a budget in parlia- ment can be an event in the political system, in the legal system, in the system of the mass media, and in the economic system. This means that integration takes place continuously in the sense of the mutual restriction of the degrees of freedom enjoyed by systems. But this integration effect is limited to single events.

As soon as we take account of prehistory and consequences, as soon as we thus cross the time boundaries of what happens simultaneously and take recursions into account, the magnetic field of the system acts on identification; the legal act of introducing the draft budget is then something other than an occasion for reports and comments in the media, something other than the political symbolization of consensus and dissent, something other than what the stock markets perceive. In the pulsation of events, systems integrate and disintegrate themselves from one moment to the next. If repeated and then anticipated, this may influence the structural development of the systems involved.

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The Source of today’s exhibit has been:

Niklas Luhmann, Theory of Society, Volume 2, Stanford University Press 2013

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