Any organization, no matter how stolid, may be unsettled by the news that a new boss is about to take over. Talk in the hallways increases, staff worry about their jobs, uncertainty grows. Even when the change has happened, problems emerge when the boss who was hired to manage from above has to learn about the organization from below . In short, the relationship between bosses and employees is complicated. In this book, Niklas Luhmann scrutinizes this relationship and shows how it is stretched to its limit by communication difficulties, demands for self-representation, problems with finding one s proper role and disagreements concerning fundamental values. The new boss s predecessor often casts a long shadow, and the influence of cliques within an organization may be hard to counteract. All of these issues are ultimately informed by the question who has the power? According to Luhmann, this much is certain: it isn t necessarily the boss, provided the employees are well versed in the art of directing their superiors. Subtervision is Luhmann s term for this state of affairs, and tact is the most important means to this end. Yet caution is advised: whoever achieves mastery in subtervision may well become the new boss. This slim and thought-provoking book from one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century will be of great interest to anyone seeking to understand the dynamics and machinations of the workplace, whether they are at the top or the bottom.

Niklas Luhmann ranks as one of the most important sociologists and social theorists of the twentieth century. Through his many books he developed a highly original form of systems theory that has been hugely influential in a wide variety of disciplines.

In "Introduction to Systems Theory," Luhmann explains the key ideas of general and sociological systems theory and supplies a wealth of examples to illustrate his approach. The book offers a wide range of concepts and theorems that can be applied to politics and the economy, religion and science, art and education, organization and the family. Moreover, Luhmann's ideas address important contemporary issues in such diverse fields as cognitive science, ecology, and the study of social movements.

This book provides all the necessary resources for readers to work through the foundations of systems theory - no other work by Luhmann is as clear and accessible as this. There is also much here that will be of great interest to more advanced scholars and practitioners in sociology and the social sciences.

Any organization, no matter how stolid, may be unsettled by the news that a new boss is about to take over. Talk in the hallways increases, staff worry about their jobs, uncertainty grows. Even when the change has happened, problems emerge when the boss who was hired to manage from above has to learn about the organization from below . In short, the relationship between bosses and employees is complicated. In this book, Niklas Luhmann scrutinizes this relationship and shows how it is stretched to its limit by communication difficulties, demands for self-representation, problems with finding one s proper role and disagreements concerning fundamental values. The new boss s predecessor often casts a long shadow, and the influence of cliques within an organization may be hard to counteract. All of these issues are ultimately informed by the question who has the power? According to Luhmann, this much is certain: it isn t necessarily the boss, provided the employees are well versed in the art of directing their superiors. Subtervision is Luhmann s term for this state of affairs, and tact is the most important means to this end. Yet caution is advised: whoever achieves mastery in subtervision may well become the new boss. This slim and thought-provoking book from one of the most influential sociologists of the 20th century will be of great interest to anyone seeking to understand the dynamics and machinations of the workplace, whether they are at the top or the bottom.

Love seems like the most personal experience, one that touches each of us in a unique way that is more personal than social, and hence it is not surprising that it has been largely neglected by sociologists and social theorists. While it has long been a central preoccupation of writers and novelists, love has rarely attracted anything more than the most cursory attention of social scientists. This short text, originally written in 1969 by the eminent German social theorist Niklas Luhmann, goes a long way to redressing this neglect. Rather than seeing love as a unique and ineffable personal experience, Luhmann treats love as a solution to a problem that depends on a wider range of social structures and forms. Human beings are faced with a world of enormous complexity and they have to find ways to order and make sense of this world. In other words, they need certain facilities for action o what Luhmann calls 'media of communication' o that enable them to select from a host of alternatives in ways that will be understood as meaningful by others. Love is one of these media; truth, power, money and art are others. With the development of modern societies, greater demands are made on this medium of love, altering the relationship between love and sexuality and giving rise to the distinctive difficulties we associate with love today. This short text by one of the most brilliant social theorists of the 20th century will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities. It is a concise and pithy statement of what is still the only sociological theory of love we have.

In T"he Reality of the Mass Media" Luhmann extends his theory of social systems - applied in his earlier works to the economy, the political system, art, religion, the sciences and law - to an examination of the role of mass media in the constitution of social reality.

Luhmann argues that the system of mass media is a set of recursive, self-referential programmes of communication, whose functions are not determined by the external values of truthfulness, objectivity, or knowledge, nor by specific social interests or political directives. Rather, he contends that the system of mass media is regulated by the internal code information / non-information, which enables the system to select its information (news) from its own environment and to communicate this information in accordance with its own reflexive criteria.

Despite its self-referential quality, however, Luhmann describes the mass media as one of the key cognitive systems of modern society, by means of which society constructs the illusion of its own reality. The reality of mass media, he argues, allows societies to process information without destabilizing social roles or overburdening social actors. It forms a broad reservoir (memory) of options for the future co-ordination of action, and it provides parameters for the stabilization of political expectations. In these respects, it has a crucial function in the general self-reproduction of society, as it produces a continuous self-description of the world around which modern society can orientate itself. In his discussion of mass media, Luhmann elaborates a theory of communication in which communication is seen not as the act of a particular consciousness, nor themedium of integrative social norms, but merely the technical codes through which systemic operations arrange and perpetuate themselves.

This book will be of great interest to third year students, graduate students and scholars in sociology, politics, social and political theory, media and cultural studies and communication studies.

In this important book Niklas Luhmann - one of the leading social thinkers of the late 20th century - analyses the emergence of love' as the basis of personal relationships in modern societies. He argues that, while family systems remained intact in the transition from traditional to modern societies, a semantics for love developed to accommodate extra-marital relationships; this semantics was then transferred back into marriage and eventually transformed marriage itself. Drawing on a diverse range of historical and literary sources, Luhmann retraces the emergence and evolution of the special semantics of passionate love that has come to form the basis of modern forms of intimacy and personal relationships. This classic book by Luhmann has been widely recognized as a work of major importance. It is an outstanding contribution to social theory and it provides an original and illuminating perspective on the nature of modern marriage and sexuality.

Niklas Luhmann ranks as one of the most important sociologists and social theorists of the twentieth century. Through his many books he developed a highly original form of systems theory that has been hugely influential in a wide variety of disciplines.

In "Introduction to Systems Theory," Luhmann explains the key ideas of general and sociological systems theory and supplies a wealth of examples to illustrate his approach. The book offers a wide range of concepts and theorems that can be applied to politics and the economy, religion and science, art and education, organization and the family. Moreover, Luhmann's ideas address important contemporary issues in such diverse fields as cognitive science, ecology, and the study of social movements.

This book provides all the necessary resources for readers to work through the foundations of systems theory - no other work by Luhmann is as clear and accessible as this. There is also much here that will be of great interest to more advanced scholars and practitioners in sociology and the social sciences.

Love seems like the most personal experience, one that touches each of us in a unique way that is more personal than social, and hence it is not surprising that it has been largely neglected by sociologists and social theorists. While it has long been a central preoccupation of writers and novelists, love has rarely attracted anything more than the most cursory attention of social scientists. This short text, originally written in 1969 by the eminent German social theorist Niklas Luhmann, goes a long way to redressing this neglect. Rather than seeing love as a unique and ineffable personal experience, Luhmann treats love as a solution to a problem that depends on a wider range of social structures and forms. Human beings are faced with a world of enormous complexity and they have to find ways to order and make sense of this world. In other words, they need certain facilities for action o what Luhmann calls 'media of communication' o that enable them to select from a host of alternatives in ways that will be understood as meaningful by others. Love is one of these media; truth, power, money and art are others. With the development of modern societies, greater demands are made on this medium of love, altering the relationship between love and sexuality and giving rise to the distinctive difficulties we associate with love today. This short text by one of the most brilliant social theorists of the 20th century will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities. It is a concise and pithy statement of what is still the only sociological theory of love we have.