ABSTRACT
This chaper talks about European influences on management and organization theory, and there is no doubt that both Latour and Luhmann influenced it, but, again, the European version of it. For many decades, social scientists dutifully studied the phenomenon of power, usually assuming its existence as a starting point, and then illuminating its effects and consequences. In Luhmann's terminology, people move from acting to observing, from action to communication. The system observes itself; it cannot change, because it observes itself from the same set of categories that constitutes it. One of Luhmann's interests concerned paradoxes and the ways in which people deal with them. He noted that the usual criticism of paradoxes and the urge to 'solve them' has to do with the fact that they violate logic. Luhmann was not that optimistic: He saw modern society as a society of observers of systems, a society that was forced, therefore, to resign from authority and to espouse ignorance.
