A Sociological Theory of Communication: The Self‐Organization of the Knowledge Society

This rather dense volume is a repackaging of 11 journal articles and book chapters published between 1993 and 2001 by an author whose sharp and intelligent writings on citation theory should be familiar to some Journal of Documentation readers (see, for example, the special issue of Scientometrics, Vol. 43 No. 1, 1998). The miscellaneous publications have been quite effectively welded together with bridging text. I cannot tell whether the original items have been edited significantly, having previously read only one (Chapter 6: “A triple helix of university‐industry‐government relations”), but the volume flows well, given the diversity of source materials and the breadth of subject coverage. Leydesdorff has an eclectic background, with degrees in biochemistry, philosophy and sociology, and this book reflects his trinity of disciplinary roots. It is a demanding text – highly abstract, compacted, and diffuse in parts – and it presumes, though the author does not say so, that the reader has more than a passing familiarity with the writings of, amongst others, Giddens, Habermas, Huygens, Latour, Luhmann, Maturana, Parsons and Shannon. The book’s purpose is stated crisply in the opening line of the Introduction: “Can society be considered as a self‐organizing (“autopoietic”) system?” And, a related concern: is the notion of a supra‐individual social system likely to be viewed as “an invitation to obscurantism?”

How, to put it another way, can we theorise the relations between individuals and society, actors and structure, and how does structural coupling occur in social networks? Translating this in terms relevant to the Journal, we might recall, as Leydesdorff suggests, how historians of science like Derek de Solla Price and Thomas Kuhn helped us “begin to understand science as an order emerging from networks of communication with dynamics relatively independent of the carrying authors” (p. 190). Given this theme, and given Leydesdorff’s impressive familiarity with multiple literature sets, the reader might be somewhat surprised to find no references to the research literature of cognitive science and related domains, for instance Edwin Hutchins on distributed cognition or Marvin Minsky on “the society of mind”, but, in the light of the already expansive nature of Leydesdorff’s investigation, that is, perhaps, asking too much.

Leydesdorff has set himself the task of constructing a sociological theory of communication, which, for him, means three things:

1. 1.

   (1) reformulating evolutionary theory to achieve a better basis for explaining cultural evolution;

2. 2.

   (2) retooling communication theory to accommodate the reflexive character of interpersonal communication; and

3. 3.

   (3) developing a systems theory which includes reflexive interactions.

Does he succeed in his ambition? I’m not entirely sure, nor, I suspect, is he. After almost 300 pages he returns to his opening question (“Is society a self‐organising system?”) only to respond that the question can be “formulated reflexively, that is, as a hypothesis: society is not a self‐organizing system as a given or by definition, but it can be considered as such.” This is not the most tractable of texts, even for readers with some familiarity with the central themes and authors. Leydesdorff does not always write with the clarity of some of those whose works he draws upon most frequently, as this lapse into prolixity, while discussing uncertainty, makes clear (p. 269): “The self‐reference provides the reflexive cogito with a previous state, and thus with a reference to finite time. Consequently, the delineation of the contingent Ego implies a reference to a transcendent Other, infinite time or Eternity. However, the contingent Self can only be delineated negatively from its Transcendency … ” This is an ambitious, scholarly and, at times, frustrating monograph. Reading it brought to mind a comment made by Christopher Langton (1996) about Francisco Varela’s writings on autopoietic systems (Varela and his collaborator, Humberto Maturana, are frequently cited by Leydesdorff): “Varela would claim that he is adding something to the scientific discussion when he casts all these phenomena in his language [the language of autopoiesis], but whatever it is he adds always seems to slip away from me whenever I try to pin it down”. At times I had a similar feeling reading A Sociological Theory of Communication.