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

Networks of communication evolve in terms of reflexive exchanges The codification of these reflections in language that is at the social level can be considered as the operating system of society Under sociologically specifiable conditions the discursive reconstructions can be expected to make the systems under reflection increasingly knowledge intensive This sociological theory of communication is founded in a tradition that includes Giddens 1979 structuration theory Habermas 1981 theory of communicative action and Luhmann s 1984 proposal to consider social systems as self organizing The study also elaborates on Shannon s 1948 mathematical theory of communication for the formalization and operationalization of the non linear dynamics The development of scientific communications can be studied using citation analysis The exchange media at the interfaces of knowledge production provide us with the evolutionary model of a Triple Helix of university industry government relations The construction of the European Information Society can then be analyzed in terms of interacting networks of communication The issues of sustainable development and the expectation of social change are discussed in relation to the possibility of a general theory of communication REVIEW In this book LoetLeydesdorff sets out to answer the question Can society be considered as a self organizing autopoietic system In the process Leydesdorff develops a general sociological theory of communication as well as a special theory of scientific communication designed to analyze complex systems such as the Euroean Information Society from review in JASIST 53 1 2002 62 63