ABSTRACT
Niklas Luhmann was born in 1927 in Lüneburg, Germany, and died in 1998. Originally a law graduate, he studied administration science and sociology at Harvard University from 1960–61, where Talcott Parsons, his sounding board and major source of inspiration, was a professor at the time. In 1968, Luhmann was appointed Professor of Sociology at the University of Bielefeld, where he remained until 1993. He is known for his theory of society as consisting of systems of communication, as presented in Social Systems (1995). The theory is based on a unique combination of biology, mathematics, philosophy and more. Luhmann has written a series of books about the different function systems of modern society: law, economics, politics, education and mass-media etc. In their Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems: An Introduction (1993) Kneer and Nassehi provide a very well-explained and comprehensive introduction to Luhmann; Borch’s (2011) Niklas Luhmann: Key Sociologists focuses on key concepts in Luhmann and positions his work in relation to other social theories; and Seidl and Becker’s Niklas Luhmann and Organization Studies (2005) offers a good starting point for studying organisations via systems theory.
