What people get wrong about Luhmann’s systems theory—and what it means for organisational intervention
This is not a blind defence of Luhmann. Other approaches offer powerful ways of understanding social life and organisations, and some raise important criticisms of his theory. But there is a difference between criticising an argument and exaggerating it into an easier target. Here are three recurring misunderstandings.
Myth 1: Operational closure makes organisational intervention impossible.
An intervention by a consultant does not directly determine how an organisation changes, just as speaking does not determine how a listener understands what is said. This does not mean the intervention is inconsequential. It means that its effects depend on how people within the organisation interpret, respond to, and act on it. The intervention is part of that process, not something that determines the outcome on its own.
Environmental changes—including those brought about by a consulting intervention—can alter the material substrate on which organisational activity depends, as well as occasion changes in organisational responses and decision premises. Luhmann’s core distinction is that operational closure does not mean causal isolation: it means that these changes do not transfer a ready-made meaning or organisational response into the system.
An external intervention may offer instructions or recommendations, but these do not determine how the organisation responds. It offers occasions for irritation, which the organisation takes up according to its own history, programmes, and decision premises.
A practitioner who takes Luhmann seriously gives up the assumption that an intended change can simply be transferred into the organisation. They attend instead to how their contributions become taken up, rejected, or transformed in organisational communication. They offer alternative distinctions, design spaces for irritation, and work with recursive decisions and undecided premises when appropriate.
Myth 2: Treating social systems as communication makes bodies and consciousness irrelevant.
Luhmann never argued that communication floats free of bodies and minds. Placing human beings in the environment of social systems is a deliberately counterintuitive move. But it does not mean that people are absent or unimportant. It distinguishes what constitutes a social system from the conditions that make its operations possible.
This distinction is theoretical, and other theories draw their boundaries differently. Theoretical distinctions do not invalidate experience. In fact, they help us explain it. Alternative theories also need to account for the choices they make and what they leave out. The question is not whether they make such choices, but whether those choices can help explain the phenomenon and whether their limitations are acknowledged.
Luhmann explicitly names what he calls psychic systems (systems of consciousness) and organic systems (living bodies) as a necessary substrate. Communication depends on embodied consciousness without consisting of conscious experiences. Luhmann discusses the relation between consciousness and communication through interpenetration and structural coupling, with language playing a central role in their coupling. These relations make influence possible without allowing one system simply to specify the other’s operations.
Myth 3: Identifying the actor explains the social event.
For Luhmann, actions are socially constituted through attribution: a communicative process is identified as an action belonging to a particular actor. This applies both when attributing a decision to an actor (“John approved the budget”) and when categorising an observable physical movement (“John kicked the can”). In the latter, the observable movement alone does not settle whether the kick was playful, aggressive, or accidental; different observers may attribute different meanings to it.
In both cases, the attribution simplifies reality but allows the flow of communication to continue. These attributions don’t necessarily reproduce John’s own understanding of what he was doing, and their social consequences do not depend on his agreeing with them. Nor are these attributions fixed. If it becomes known that John approved the budget under coercion, this may change how his decision is interpreted and what consequences follow. Similarly, if the can he kicked broke a window, further communication may be needed to establish whether, and in what sense, he should be held responsible.
What appears in organisational communication as a discrete deed by an identifiable actor can depend on a much wider sequence of communications, expectations, and prior decisions. Attribution locates responsibility and agency in an identifiable actor, simplifying a communicative process whose production cannot be explained by that actor alone. Such attributions help organise further communication, including questions of responsibility and accountability.
Why does this all matter?
On one hand, trying to influence an organisation solely by changing “individual mindsets” overlooks how organisational communication takes up, rejects, or transforms what individuals propose and do. Changing individual mindsets does not, by itself, explain organisational change. The question is how those changes become consequential for the organisation’s recurring decisions and decision premises.
On the other hand, focusing exclusively on the local, immediate emergence of bodies in relation risks overlooking what becomes of those encounters organisationally. A powerful encounter is not yet evidence of organisational change. The further question is whether (and how) it becomes consequential for subsequent decisions, expectations, or decision premises, including informal ones.
Second-order observation adds another question: through which distinctions does the organisation observe and evaluate the encounter? What makes it count as useful, irrelevant, successful, or disruptive? Examining those distinctions can make the organisation’s criteria of relevance available for reflection, rather than taking them for granted.
This perspective changes what practitioners attend to and what they can reasonably claim about their interventions. Whether a particular intervention is useful remains a practical and empirical question.