Chair of Sociological Theory

Some decades later, Talcott Parsons studied intentionally in Europe to learn to understand this insecurity as an inventory problem. He translates the problem of order into the differentiation between structure and process which he calls the "`structural-functional´ level of analysis" and expands under the name of social system (The Social System, 1951, p. vii). This quite simply means relationally linked, contextualized actions. "The problem of order" expressly stays an organizational problem, especially when binding decisions regarding scarce goods or controversial aims have to be made in social relationships (l.c., p. 71, cf. ch. iii). The fatal complementarity of "Auflösung" and "Befestigung" as designed by Comte is thus replaced by the very future-oriented complementarity of action and decision, of "Öffnung" and "Schließung". Sociology, so Parsons, is "analyzing the organization and dynamics of complex social systems" (l.c., p. 73).

But as late as the 1960s, Niklas Luhmann notices that, considering a hardly noticeable "Einheit des Fachs", sociology is "ziemlich undiszipliniert" (Soziologische Aufklärung 1, 1970, p. 113). His suggestion is to give up both Comte´s preference for dissolution-resistant order and Parsons´s preference for structural inventory, and instead to observe "die Gesamtheit der möglichen Ereignisse" in the context of the differentiation between "System und Welt" (l.c., p. 115). The possibility of social order remains the reference problem of sociology, which it analyzes under the name of the system regarding the possibility of society and the possibility of organization. But now it develops this problem area in the form of two key concepts: contingency and complexity.