Description

This is my reading notes for the following paper:
Mingers, J., 2002. Can social systems be autopoietic? Assessing Luhmanns social theory. Sociological Review 50, 278-299.

Mingers is interested in whether social systems can be autopoietic, and for this reason analyses several theories which are linked to the concept. In this paper he assesses Luhmann's autopoietic theory against Maturana's original concept of autopoiesis and the final verdict is: "agnosticism". It is a consistent application of the original theory, but it has two major flaws:
1. The components of social systems are communicative events, but it is not clear how these produce further communicative events - what are the processes in the social systems? This may be so, because the mutual interaction between people and society undertheorised
2. The theory's claim that communication has a boundary may be accepted in an intuitive way, but the boundary of social subsystems remains problematic.

Actually, this paper contains a very good short introduction to Luhmann's theory of social systems and autopoiesis, a Luhmannn for Dummies section, sort of. Read the original paper if you feel you do not understand Luhmann because you will realize it is not your fault.
I also found extremely useful the section about why social theory finds the concept of autopoiesis attractive.