40 years of Luhmann's legacy in the Anglophone academic community: a quantitative content analysis of Luhmannian research

ABSTRACT

The current study presents the longitudinal overview of 40 years of Luhmannian research in the Anglophone academic community by employing a quantitative content analysis. As the first study of this kind, this paper aims to explore the current topography of Luhmannian research. For the purpose, a total of 1,231 journal articles published in English were analyzed in terms of the number of articles in relation to several variables such as publication year, region, discipline, methodology, and the purpose of utilizing Luhmann. In summary, the key findings include: first, decreasing Anglo-American authors' contributions to the Luhmannian research in the English-language academic publications, as opposed to growing outputs of authors from continental Europe and other regions; second, the difference in the maturity of Luhmannian scholarship by region; third, the demonstration of the breadth and versatility of Luhmann's theory of systems; fourth, the capability of Luhmann's theory accommodating empirical research and its potential as a framework to lead fruitful research streams. This study is expected to provide a useful reference for Luhmannian researchers, as well as for authors from other research strands.

KEYWORDS:

• Niklas Luhmann
• systems theory
• quantitative content analysis
• reception trends
• social theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Y. J. Sohn, She is interested in exploring communication phenomena by combining social theories such as Luhmann's theory of social systems and Latour's actor-network theory with communication studies. In particular, her current research interest is centered on how values are collectively created, communicated, and distributed during bad times, such as disasters and crises. She has published articles on crisis communication and corporate reputation in top-tier communication journals.

Notes

1 There are other opinions of why Luhmann is less studied in the Anglo-American academia. For instance, Rasch (2017) elaborates on the barriers to an Anglophone understanding of Luhmann's system theory by linking to the changes in scholarly trends and conditions in Anglophone academia.

2 For this study, a total of 52 databases of EBSCOhost, including Academic Search Complete, Business Source Complete, Communication & Mass Media Complete, SocINDEX with Full Text, and Sociological Collection were searched. To name a few of the databases, Academic Search Complete alone offers 5300 scholarly, multi-disciplinary full-text periodicals, including 4400 peer-reviewed journals in addition to indexing a total of 10,900 publications; Business Source Complete provides for more than 1200 journals; Communication and Mass Media Collection offers more than 400 periodicals; SocINDEX with Full Text contains full text for 777 journals; and the Sociological Collection includes more than 475 full-text titles, according to the EBSCOhost database descriptions.

3 The literature search had been done multiple times over a year and the last search was made on April 19th, 2020.

4 Most of the excluded articles cited Luhmann for conceptual definitions. The most often cited definitions were those of ‘trust’ and ‘familiarity.’ Another type of articles that was dropped mentioned Luhmann as a part of a list. An example is: ‘ … sociologists have a range of theoretical traditions within which they can frame new studies. These include Marxism (Marx, 1981), structural functionalism (Alexander, 1989), …  … , systems theory (Luhmann, 1995), symbolic interactionism (Johnson et al., 1992) and social construction theory (Berger & Luckman, 1967) among others.’ (*Source: Hamilton, D. (2004). The social and academic standing of the information systems discipline: General theory considered as cultural capital. Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application, 6(2), 1–12, p. 5)

5 The source of the regional classification: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_regional_classification

6 As an attribute of the language-region variable, ‘English-speaking regions’ should be differentiated from ‘Anglophone academic community’ as the latter is used in more general term, referring to the group of scholars who publish in English, regardless of their original nationalities.

7 These countries have German ‘as (one of) their nationwide official language(s), as well as dependent territories with German as a co-official language’ according to the ‘List of territorial entities where German is an official language’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_entities_where_German_is_an_official_language).

8 For instance, Kieser and Seidl's article (2013), titled ‘Communication-Centered Approaches in German Management Research: The Influence of Sociological and Philosophical Traditions,’ which was published in Management Communication Quarterly, was categorized as the field of organizational studies by considering the topic and the author's affiliation with the department of corporate management. By contrast, ‘Why Organizational Communication Has Not Gained a Foothold in German-Speaking Communication Studies Until Now: An Historical Outline’ (2013) by Theis-Berglmair, which was published in the same journal, was categorized as communication studies by reflecting the author's affiliation with the department of communication. Meanwhile, the articles whose topics are systems theory itself and those involving multiple fields (e.g., simultaneously covering economy, politics, law etc.) were classified as sociology.

9 The categories of disciplines were adapted from NSSE's (National Survey of Student Engagement) major categories published by Indiana University: http://nsse.indiana.edu/pdf/NSSE_8_Major_Categories.pdf. The major differences were communication and law. According to the source, these fields were categorized as ‘Other’ majors. However, considering the importance of these areas in Luhmann's research, as well as the number of articles coded, communication and law were classified as separate disciplines. The detailed classifications of the eight disciplines are as below:

*Art & Humanities: art, literature, linguistics, theology or religion, history, philosophy, theatre/film studies, music, heritage study

*Business & Management: management, organization studies, business, marketing, accounting, finance

*Communication & Media Studies: communication (including health communication, environmental communication, crisis/risk communication), media studies, journalism, public relations, advertising

*Science & Engineering: information technology, environmental science, biology, mathematics

*Social Science: sociology, political science (including government, international relations), economy, public health, public administration, social work, sport sociology, psychology, anthropology, geography

*Others: urban planning, criminology, agriculture, tourism.

10 Some examples of the goal statements include: ‘to criticize Luhmann's theory that eliminates humans from social theory and to discuss the observer-problem in Luhmann's theory’ (Hejl, 2015); ‘to critically review the systems theory with regard to mass media and social media within an integrity and to argue that Luhmann's social systems theory today falls short of analyzing media efficiently despite that emphasis. The argument is endorsed in three main sections.’ (Gerim, 2017)

11 For instance, ‘to explore certain key concepts (complexity & intersubjectivity) in Luhmann's presentation’ (Bednarz, 1984); ‘to illuminate Luhmann's conception of communication and to clarify his conception of structural coupling with a help of multi-agent model simulation’ (Füllsack, 2012)

12 For instance, ‘to extend Luhmann's deliberations on the temporal into the spatial; to demonstrate the possibility of developing further into a geography of autopoietic systems’ (Gren & Zierhofer, 2003); ‘attempts to integrate emotions into Luhmann's theory by reflecting on the functions of emotions for different types of systems -- organic, psychic and social so as to fill the gap in Luhmann's theory’ (Riese, 2011)

13 For example, ‘to propose complementing actor-network theory (ANT) with Niklas Luhmann's communication theory, in order to overcome one of ANT's major shortcomings, namely, the lack of a conceptual repertoire to describe virtual processes such as sense-making’ (Farías, 2014); ‘this paper argues that its “grounded systemic theoretical approach” (the combination of Luhmann's systems theory and Glaser's grounded theory) provides some heuristic value’ (Mitchell, 2007)

14 For instance, ‘to compare the programs of Niklas Luhmann's General Theory of Social Systems (GTSS) and Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT) from a systematic perspective related to what are considered the main problems addressed by sociology’ (Ocampo, 2016); and ‘to weigh up the pros and cons of the various risk positions and comments [of Beck, Giddens, Luhmann and others] on risk and danger in social and geographical terms’ (Sapountzaki, 2010)

15 For instance, ‘to analyse the reception of Niklas Luhmann's social metatheory in Slovenian social thought’ (Adam et al., 2005); and ‘to review trends in systems theory/thinking from the 1970s to the early 2000s. It proposes a maturation of the field based on certain conceptual and methodological advances that have sought to liberate systems thinking from earlier strictures.’ (Barton et al., 2004)

16 For instance, ‘to observe the contemporary media system in the light of Luhmann's media system, namely a specific function system of society which has witnessed ever greater internal complexity vis-a-vis an environment marked by the spread of the web and social network sites’ (Artieri & Gemini, 2019); and ‘to analyse the effects of boundaryless careers on organizational decision making by drawing on Luhmann's theory of social systems’ (Becker & Haunschild, 2003).

17 For instance, ‘aims to reconceptualize Luhmann's concept of trust by redefining it as a connection medium [new definition], which mediates between the different levels of sociality—interaction, organization, and society. These theoretical considerations are employed to develop a more applied framework for empirical research, with a brief case study from southern Italy’ (Morgner, 2018)

18 For example, ‘to explore how social forces are imposed on fund managers when they do their jobs of observing company information by drawing on a combination of Luhmann's system theory and Network theory’ (Henningsson, 2009)

19 Two articles that covered the interviews with Luhmann were excluded.

20 The statistical test for this association between time and discipline is not reported as too many cells had expected count less than five, meaning that the validity of the test is questionable. All the crosstab test results of which validity is questioned due to the same reason are not reported in the following tests.

21 In terms of the number of articles, Valentinof alone, as a sole/lead author or a co-author, accounted for about 37.8% of 90 articles published by authors from German-speaking countries in the field of business and management. Roth as well, as a sole/lead author or a co-author, occupied around 31.2% of 93 articles published by those from other-language countries in the same field of study.

22 The combined number of articles of these two authors occupied about 30% of 64 articles published by authors from English-speaking countries in the field of Law.