Social Immune Mechanisms: Luhmann and Potentialization Technologies

Andersen, Niels Åkerstrøm and Stenner, Paul (2020). Social Immune Mechanisms: Luhmann and Potentialization Technologies. Theory, Culture & Society, 37(2) pp. 79–103.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419868768

Abstract

Contemporary discourses of management are full of encouragements to ‘expect the unexpected’ and to celebrate ‘the future of the future’. Many new public managerial technologies of change – such as steering Labs, future games, and managerial performance arts - promise the co- creative ‘potentialisation’ of employees, citizens and organisations. This paper approaches such potentialisation technologies as immune mechanisms which serve to protect the social system from itself. From a perspective inspired by autopoietic systems theory, potentialisation technologies provide autoimmunity by problematising institutional structures and providing ‘anti-structural’ space-times to facilitate transformation. There is a price to pay for this immune function, however, since these immune mechanisms cannot discriminate between productive and unproductive structures. By dissolving the certainty of the expectations that underlie the connectivity of diverse organisational operations, they risk harming the welfare systems that host them.

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