Luhmann and Actor-Network Theory combined: Farm enterprises as self-organizing systems

Summary

From a rural, sociological point of view no really satisfying social theories suggested have been able to grasp the complexity and special character of a farm entity. The contention of this paper is that a combination of Luhmann’s theory of social systems and the Actor-network Theory of Latour, Callon, and Law offers a fruitful binocular perspective of a farm as a framework for understanding a farm as a self-organizing entity and for studying the social, economic, technical, and biological aspects. The two approaches build on two different ontologies and cannot readily be merged into one theory.
Luhmann’s theory offers an approach to understand a farm as a self-organizing system (operating in meaning) that has to produce and reproduce itself through demarcation from the surrounding world by selection of meaning. The meaning of the system is expressed through the goals, values, and the logic of the farming processes. His theory, however, gets weak on studying the material's heterogeneous character of a farm as a mixture of biology, sociology, technology, and economy.
The Actor-network theory offers an approach to focus on the heterogeneous network of interactions of human and non-human actors such as knowledge, technology, money, farmland, animals, plants etc., and as to how these interactions depend on both the quality of the actors and the network context of interaction, but the theory is weak when it comes to explaining the self-organizing character of a farm enterprise.

Available Versions of this Item

• Luhmann and Actor-Network Theory combined: Farm enterprises as self-organizing systems. (deposited 06 Nov 2002) [Currently Displayed]
  • Combining Luhmann and Actor-Network Theory to see Farm Enterprises as Self-organizing Systems. (deposited 06 Jun 2003)
    • Combining Luhmann and Actor-Network Theory to see Farm Enterprises as Self-organizing Systems. (deposited 10 Jan 2003)