Strategy, The Path of History and Social Evolution: The Luhmann Sequel

Abstract

This paper argues that integrating modernist and postmodernist views on the basis of evolutionary principles applied to social systems offers the potential to build thinking about society and its future on stable, formal grounds. Social evolution is a dialectic process that is the outcome of the interplay of competitive processes over scarce resources on the one hand and the characteristics of human thinking and creativity on the other hand. In the competitive process, actors and organizations compete with each other by stressing, using and developing old or new characteristics. Human perception and thinking can be characterized as a hierarchical structure of binary alternatives which gives rise to – sometimes radical – switches between alternative approaches to ‘problems’.

The paper is outlined as follows: In the first section I describe the connection between social thinkers and evolution. Interestingly, there is a link between these thinkers and the genealogy of critical theory, e.g. in Hegel and Marx. In the second section, I describe perspectives relevant for a conceptualization of social evolution and justify the transfer of biological models to the domain of social sciences. In the third section, I describe the model and in the fourth section I link back the characteristics arising from the dualistic nature of evolution to critical theory and implications for strategy research.

This is a second version of Strategy, The Path of History and Social Evolution including a discussion of Luhmann and Parsons.

Keywords: Luhmann, Parsons, Strategy, Evolution, Mental Representation, Dialectics