Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen
Biographic Data
| ID | 277805 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Niels Åkerstrøm |
| FAMILY NAME | Andersen |
| SIGNATURE | ANDERSEN N Å |
| AFFILIATIONS | Copenhagen Business School |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5731-740X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 78 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
A Pandemic of Possibilities: The Spread of Potentiality-Seeking Organisations under Conditions of the Covid-19 Lockdown
The premise of this paper is that an adequate understanding of the impact the pandemic had upon society presupposes an adequate theory of society. This must include a theory of the various systems and organisations that compose society and that were impacted by the pandemic and are shaping its aftermath. This paper adopts and adapts Luhmann’s autopoietic systems theory to provide a ‘frame’ for understanding key societal reactions to the Covid-19 …
Potentialising the potential: Dream of everything you can become, and become everything you dream of
In education, the child is often observed as a potential to be shaped and realised. In this article, we analyse the educational program, First Lego League. Surprisingly, its aim is not simply to realise a potential, but to potentialise the child to become unlimited potential. Children should become ‘a force for change’, and they are told that ‘you can be anything, just do it!’. To implement this program, First Lego League develops a transition me…
Form and media in management and organizational history how different research programs transform the ‘Past’ into ‘History’
Management and organizational history has devoted relatively little attention to what constitutes ‘data’, hindering potentially productive discussions between diverse research programs. This article analyzes variations in how research programs observe and create empirical data. To do so, we introduce the difference between form and medium as implicated in all observations. Observation is a tight coupling (form), which is made of, and made possibl…
(Re-)Vitalizing the Concept of Organization: Inspirations From Recent Social Theory
In this essay, we introduce recent debates on both concepts of organization and organization's future. Since Max Weber's ideas gained acceptance, there has been a strong link between social theory (rationalized modernity) and a concept of organization (bureaucracy) in organization theory as well as organizational sociology. Today, organizational scholarship challenges, but at the same time defends, this classical link. We argue that both position…
How the Welfare State Tries to Protect Itself Against the law: Luhmann and new Forms of Social Immune Mechanism
Sociologist Niklas Luhmann argued that the law functions as society’s immune system by regulating conflicts that threaten the certainty of expectation structures. In this article, we argue that law itself has become a target of new social immune mechanisms. Since the 1980s, welfare states have increasingly seen their own structures as a threat. Today, the ideal is a public sector consisting of organizations that constantly emerge anew by selectin…
From self-evident norms to contingent couplings: A systems-theoretical analysis of changes in the relationship between schools and the function systems in Denmark
Taking a point of departure in the paradoxical fact that the increase in educational knowledge leads to an increase in uncertainty for educational organisations, this article explores how uncertainty and contingency have increasingly become an integral part of school governance. The article draws on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of ‘World Society’ as a functional differentiated society providing a range of different symbolic media for educational organ…
The emotional organization and the problem of authenticity: The romantic, the pedagogic, the therapeutic and the ludic as liminal media of transition
Max Weber excluded the phenomenon of emotions from the idea of rational bureaucracy. Modern European organizational theories are on the other hand almost obsessed by emotions and especially affect. Emotion re‐entered organizational theory around the limited topic of ‘emotional labour', but today, passion is generally praised as a driver in successful organizations. An important element here is the demand upon passionate employees to install the o…
Potentialization: Loosening up relations between public organizations and societal function systems
This article provides a historical perspective on the relations between public organizations and function systems using Denmark as case. Current concepts like ‘public value’, ‘co-creation’, ‘relational coordination’ and ‘inter-professional management’ promises new coherence and shared communities in the single public organization. The present article argues that rather than building up communities the concepts function as a form of creative cutti…
Social Immune Mechanisms: Luhmann and Potentialization Technologies
Contemporary discourses of management are full of encouragements to 'expect the unexpected' and to celebrate 'the future of the future'. Many new public managerial technologies of change - such as steering labs, future games, and managerial performance arts - promise the co-creative 'potentialization' of employees, citizens and organizations. This paper approaches such potentialization technologies as immune mechanisms which serve to protect the …
When no is not an option: The immunization against silence in a motivational interview about marijuana use
On the history of the form of administrative decisions: How decisions begin to desire uncertainty
In management and organization history, the concept of the decision has often been understood as an ahistorical phenomenon. The changing contexts, technologies, and subjects of decision-making have been thoroughly studied, but decision itself is rarely made an object of historical investigation. Addressing the question of how the very form of the decision changes in the course of history, this article studies the Danish public administration from…
Introduction: The necessity of a new understanding of responsibility for modern society
An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the concept of responsibility, the discourse about responsibility, and the attribution of responsibility in an interdisciplinary context
Playful hyper-responsibility and the making of a performing audience
The citizen is currently presumed to lack both the will to take responsibility and the imagination to see what his or her responsibility may include. This »lack of responsibility« becomes an object of intervention because function systems see themselves as depending on the citizens: The educational system sees itself as depending on the student to succeed in creating learning; the health system sees itself as depending on the patient to succeed i…
Playful membership: Embracing an unknown future
This article studies the implications of current attempts by organizations to adapt to a world of constant change by introducing the notion of playful organizational membership. To this end we conduct a brief semantic history of organizational play and argue that when organizations play, employees are expected to engage in playful exploration of alternative selves. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's theory of time and decision-making and Gregory Bateson…
Playful organisations: Undecidability as a scarce resource
This article explores how organisational play becomes a managerial tool to increase and benefit from undecidability. The article draws on Niklas Luhmann's concept of decision and on Gregory Bateson's theory of play to create a conceptual framework for analysing the relation between decision and undecidability. With an empirical point of departure in Danish public school policy and two concrete examples of games utilised in school development, the…
Playful hyper responsibility: Toward a dislocation of parents’ responsibility
Over the past 10–15 years, state-funded schools have begun to require parents to assume an undefined and infinite personal responsibility. In this article, we investigate how schools organize responsibility games to respond to this challenge and how these games affect the concept of responsibility. We point to a dislocation in the way parents are assigned responsibility, because the definition of responsibility is not only a question of formulati…
Hyperansvar: Når personligt ansvar gøres til genstand for styring
I løbet af de sidste 10-15 år er skolen begyndt at forvente af forældrene, at de tager et udefineret og grænseløst personligt ansvar for deres børn som skolebørn. Det personlige ansvar bliver dermed genstand for offentlig styring på nye måder. I denne artikel undersøger vi, hvordan begrebet ansvar påvirkes af denne styring. Vi peger på en forskydning i den måde, forældrene tildeles ansvar, idet ansvar ikke længere handler om at leve op til regler…
Hybrid Forms of Governance
This book is about how power communication inrecent years hasbegun to reflect on its own limits in a new way. It focuseson a number of areas within the welfare state and how power desires non-power. I
Werke und Werkgruppen
Es gibt mindestens drei Merkmale, die auch ein soziologisch ungeschulter Beobachter intuitiv mit einer Organisation verbindet. Zum einen kann man der Organisation eigene Zwecke zuordnen, die sie mit den vereinten und dadurch potenzierten Kräften ihrer Mitglieder verfolgt. Unter diesem Aspekt hat man Organisationen auch als Perfektionsformen sozialer Kooperation beschrieben. Ferner fällt auf, dass es in allen Organisationen eine transitive Rangord…
Hybrid Forms of Governance: Self-Suspension of Power
Conceptual history and the diagnostics of the present
This article explores Niklas Luhmann’s semantic analytical strategy. With Luhmann we get a sociologically informed conceptual history in which Koselleck’s guiding distinction between conceptual history and social history is replaced with a distinction between semantic and social structure, where the latter should be interpreted as the form of communicative differentiation and structural coupling within society. Here the guiding idea is that the c…
Hvem er Yum-Yum? Tegneseriestaten i svøb
Artiklen analyserer kampagnen: ”Leg dig sund”, som er tilrettelagt af Fødevarestyrelsen og Sundhedsstyrelsen. ”Leg dig sund” retter sig mod især udsatte familier og deres vilje, viden og handlekapacitet til at leve sundt. Centrum i artiklen er kampagnens kobling til leg. Hvordan kan det være, at leg står så centralt i kampagnen? Hvad har leg og kampagne med hinanden at gøre? Hvad har sundhed og leg med hinanden at gøre? Et centralt træk ved kampa…
The world as will and adaptation: The Interdiscursive Coupling of Citizens' Contracts
A new form of contracts has emerged between public administration and the single citizen within the last 15 years. The present article will attempt to situate citizens' contracts in a larger systemic framework, in order to understand more fully an increasingly complex public administration that is making new and contradictory demands on public managers. Citizens' contracts emerge naturally as a form in which the individual can undertake a reconna…
The Self-Infantilised Adult and the Management of Personality
The new practices of human resource management can be seen as an expression of management communication, which has become increasingly pedagogical. This article is based on Luhmann systems theory regarding second-order observation. The article tries to observe how management communications observe the self-observations of employees, and claims that these observations take place within the code of the pedagogic. A number of effects are discussed: …
Creating the Client Who Can Create Himself and His Own Fate – the Tragedy of the Citizens’ Contract
This article is about the emergence of new forms of active citizenry, empowerment, and self-help that meet in the so-called citizens’ contract. Based on Danish social policy, the article shows how the articulation of the citizen as ‘fellow citizen’ has led to the current contractualization of the relationship between the administration and the individual citizen. Citizens’ contracts are employed not only to commit clients to a specific behavior, …
Conceptual history and the diagnostics of the present
This article explores Niklas Luhmann’s semantic analytical strategy. With Luhmann we get a sociologically informed conceptual history in which Koselleck’s guiding distinction between conceptual history and social history is replaced with a distinction between semantic and social structure, where the latter should be interpreted as the form of communicative differentiation and structural coupling within society. Here the guiding idea is that the c…
Social Immune Mechanisms: Luhmann and Potentialization Technologies
Contemporary discourses of management are full of encouragements to 'expect the unexpected' and to celebrate 'the future of the future'. Many new public managerial technologies of change - such as steering labs, future games, and managerial performance arts - promise the co-creative 'potentialization' of employees, citizens and organizations. This paper approaches such potentialization technologies as immune mechanisms which serve to protect the …
The world as will and adaptation: The Interdiscursive Coupling of Citizens' Contracts
A new form of contracts has emerged between public administration and the single citizen within the last 15 years. The present article will attempt to situate citizens' contracts in a larger systemic framework, in order to understand more fully an increasingly complex public administration that is making new and contradictory demands on public managers. Citizens' contracts emerge naturally as a form in which the individual can undertake a reconna…
Public Market - Political Firms
The main argument in this paper is that private companies become an integral part of the political system when public services are contracted out. Private companies begin to compete for influence on political goals to strengthen their positions for future tenders. Firms that are subcontractors to the public sector find that everyday financial decisions may have an impact on the political process. It becomes necessary for a private firm in the pub…
Creating the Client Who Can Create Himself and His Own Fate – the Tragedy of the Citizens’ Contract
This article is about the emergence of new forms of active citizenry, empowerment, and self-help that meet in the so-called citizens’ contract. Based on Danish social policy, the article shows how the articulation of the citizen as ‘fellow citizen’ has led to the current contractualization of the relationship between the administration and the individual citizen. Citizens’ contracts are employed not only to commit clients to a specific behavior, …
Playful organisations: Undecidability as a scarce resource
This article explores how organisational play becomes a managerial tool to increase and benefit from undecidability. The article draws on Niklas Luhmann's concept of decision and on Gregory Bateson's theory of play to create a conceptual framework for analysing the relation between decision and undecidability. With an empirical point of departure in Danish public school policy and two concrete examples of games utilised in school development, the…
Potentialization: Loosening up relations between public organizations and societal function systems
This article provides a historical perspective on the relations between public organizations and function systems using Denmark as case. Current concepts like ‘public value’, ‘co-creation’, ‘relational coordination’ and ‘inter-professional management’ promises new coherence and shared communities in the single public organization. The present article argues that rather than building up communities the concepts function as a form of creative cutti…
Playful membership: Embracing an unknown future
This article studies the implications of current attempts by organizations to adapt to a world of constant change by introducing the notion of playful organizational membership. To this end we conduct a brief semantic history of organizational play and argue that when organizations play, employees are expected to engage in playful exploration of alternative selves. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's theory of time and decision-making and Gregory Bateson…
A Pandemic of Possibilities: The Spread of Potentiality-Seeking Organisations under Conditions of the Covid-19 Lockdown
The premise of this paper is that an adequate understanding of the impact the pandemic had upon society presupposes an adequate theory of society. This must include a theory of the various systems and organisations that compose society and that were impacted by the pandemic and are shaping its aftermath. This paper adopts and adapts Luhmann’s autopoietic systems theory to provide a ‘frame’ for understanding key societal reactions to the Covid-19 …
(Re-)Vitalizing the Concept of Organization: Inspirations From Recent Social Theory
In this essay, we introduce recent debates on both concepts of organization and organization's future. Since Max Weber's ideas gained acceptance, there has been a strong link between social theory (rationalized modernity) and a concept of organization (bureaucracy) in organization theory as well as organizational sociology. Today, organizational scholarship challenges, but at the same time defends, this classical link. We argue that both position…
On the history of the form of administrative decisions: How decisions begin to desire uncertainty
In management and organization history, the concept of the decision has often been understood as an ahistorical phenomenon. The changing contexts, technologies, and subjects of decision-making have been thoroughly studied, but decision itself is rarely made an object of historical investigation. Addressing the question of how the very form of the decision changes in the course of history, this article studies the Danish public administration from…
Playful hyper responsibility: Toward a dislocation of parents’ responsibility
Over the past 10–15 years, state-funded schools have begun to require parents to assume an undefined and infinite personal responsibility. In this article, we investigate how schools organize responsibility games to respond to this challenge and how these games affect the concept of responsibility. We point to a dislocation in the way parents are assigned responsibility, because the definition of responsibility is not only a question of formulati…
The Self-Infantilised Adult and the Management of Personality
The new practices of human resource management can be seen as an expression of management communication, which has become increasingly pedagogical. This article is based on Luhmann systems theory regarding second-order observation. The article tries to observe how management communications observe the self-observations of employees, and claims that these observations take place within the code of the pedagogic. A number of effects are discussed: …
How the Welfare State Tries to Protect Itself Against the law: Luhmann and new Forms of Social Immune Mechanism
Sociologist Niklas Luhmann argued that the law functions as society’s immune system by regulating conflicts that threaten the certainty of expectation structures. In this article, we argue that law itself has become a target of new social immune mechanisms. Since the 1980s, welfare states have increasingly seen their own structures as a threat. Today, the ideal is a public sector consisting of organizations that constantly emerge anew by selectin…
When no is not an option: The immunization against silence in a motivational interview about marijuana use
Public Market - Political Firms
The main argument in this paper is that private companies become an integral part of the political system when public services are contracted out. Private companies begin to compete for influence on political goals to strengthen their positions for future tenders. Firms that are subcontractors to the public sector find that everyday financial decisions may have an impact on the political process. It becomes necessary for a private firm in the pub…
The discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau
The Argentinian Ernesto Laclau has conducted one of the most comprehensive rewritings of Foucault’s discourse analysis. Ernesto Laclau currently works in the Department of Government, Essex University, UK; throughout his career he has been interested in questions of politics and the state. He was associated with the Marxist criticism of the 1970s and had a similar perspective to those of Louis Althusser and Antonius Gramsci. In 1985, he published…
Further reading
Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory
Of the writers included in this book, Niklas Luhmann is unquestionably, and in many ways, the most comprehensive. He has written more than 50 books and over 400 articles. One of his goals has been to test the general stating power of systems theory by writing at least one book about each of the function systems of modern society. Hence, he has conducted extensive historical analyses of the scientific system, the political system, the system of ar…
Reinhart Koselleck’s history of concepts
Reinhart Koselleck’s history of concepts probably represents the clearest breakthrough of the linguistic turn within historical science. Koselleck’s history of concepts was developed at end of the 1950s and, since then, has become an extensive programme for the study of the rise of modernity. The programme studies the origins of a great number of concepts, particularly political and administrative ones, in connection with the effects of their soc…
Index
Examples of other analytical strategies
A hall of mirrors or a pool of analytical strategies
In this concluding chapter, I will seek to let the different analytics and analytical strategies in Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau and Luhmann reflect each other and, in so doing, attempt to compare them directly. This requires some form of standard of comparison – a uniform concept that will allow the distinctions to stand out. However, that in itself is a questionable operation, since the principal distinctions that define their constituent divers…
The discourse analysis of Michel Foucault
More than anyone, Michel Foucault has developed and created an agenda for discourse analysis. Moreover, he has received the widest recognition within the social sciences. At present, he functions as nothing short of a guru within research on economic regulation, and has inspired, for example, analyses of the genealogy of financial management and calculation. Although I have studied Foucault longer than any other writer, he is probably still the o…
Discursive analytical strategies: Understanding Foucault, Koselleck, Laclau, Luhmann
The Self-Infantilised Adult and the Management of Personality
The new practices of human resource management can be seen as an expression of management communication, which has become increasingly pedagogical. This article is based on Luhmann systems theory regarding second-order observation. The article tries to observe how management communications observe the self-observations of employees, and claims that these observations take place within the code of the pedagogic. A number of effects are discussed: …
Creating the Client Who Can Create Himself and His Own Fate – the Tragedy of the Citizens’ Contract
This article is about the emergence of new forms of active citizenry, empowerment, and self-help that meet in the so-called citizens’ contract. Based on Danish social policy, the article shows how the articulation of the citizen as ‘fellow citizen’ has led to the current contractualization of the relationship between the administration and the individual citizen. Citizens’ contracts are employed not only to commit clients to a specific behavior, …
The world as will and adaptation: The Interdiscursive Coupling of Citizens' Contracts
A new form of contracts has emerged between public administration and the single citizen within the last 15 years. The present article will attempt to situate citizens' contracts in a larger systemic framework, in order to understand more fully an increasingly complex public administration that is making new and contradictory demands on public managers. Citizens' contracts emerge naturally as a form in which the individual can undertake a reconna…
Hvem er Yum-Yum? Tegneseriestaten i svøb
Artiklen analyserer kampagnen: ”Leg dig sund”, som er tilrettelagt af Fødevarestyrelsen og Sundhedsstyrelsen. ”Leg dig sund” retter sig mod især udsatte familier og deres vilje, viden og handlekapacitet til at leve sundt. Centrum i artiklen er kampagnens kobling til leg. Hvordan kan det være, at leg står så centralt i kampagnen? Hvad har leg og kampagne med hinanden at gøre? Hvad har sundhed og leg med hinanden at gøre? Et centralt træk ved kampa…
Hybrid Forms of Governance: Self-Suspension of Power
Conceptual history and the diagnostics of the present
This article explores Niklas Luhmann’s semantic analytical strategy. With Luhmann we get a sociologically informed conceptual history in which Koselleck’s guiding distinction between conceptual history and social history is replaced with a distinction between semantic and social structure, where the latter should be interpreted as the form of communicative differentiation and structural coupling within society. Here the guiding idea is that the c…
Hybrid Forms of Governance
This book is about how power communication inrecent years hasbegun to reflect on its own limits in a new way. It focuseson a number of areas within the welfare state and how power desires non-power. I
Werke und Werkgruppen
Es gibt mindestens drei Merkmale, die auch ein soziologisch ungeschulter Beobachter intuitiv mit einer Organisation verbindet. Zum einen kann man der Organisation eigene Zwecke zuordnen, die sie mit den vereinten und dadurch potenzierten Kräften ihrer Mitglieder verfolgt. Unter diesem Aspekt hat man Organisationen auch als Perfektionsformen sozialer Kooperation beschrieben. Ferner fällt auf, dass es in allen Organisationen eine transitive Rangord…
Hyperansvar: Når personligt ansvar gøres til genstand for styring
I løbet af de sidste 10-15 år er skolen begyndt at forvente af forældrene, at de tager et udefineret og grænseløst personligt ansvar for deres børn som skolebørn. Det personlige ansvar bliver dermed genstand for offentlig styring på nye måder. I denne artikel undersøger vi, hvordan begrebet ansvar påvirkes af denne styring. Vi peger på en forskydning i den måde, forældrene tildeles ansvar, idet ansvar ikke længere handler om at leve op til regler…
Playful membership: Embracing an unknown future
This article studies the implications of current attempts by organizations to adapt to a world of constant change by introducing the notion of playful organizational membership. To this end we conduct a brief semantic history of organizational play and argue that when organizations play, employees are expected to engage in playful exploration of alternative selves. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's theory of time and decision-making and Gregory Bateson…
Playful organisations: Undecidability as a scarce resource
This article explores how organisational play becomes a managerial tool to increase and benefit from undecidability. The article draws on Niklas Luhmann's concept of decision and on Gregory Bateson's theory of play to create a conceptual framework for analysing the relation between decision and undecidability. With an empirical point of departure in Danish public school policy and two concrete examples of games utilised in school development, the…
Playful hyper responsibility: Toward a dislocation of parents’ responsibility
Over the past 10–15 years, state-funded schools have begun to require parents to assume an undefined and infinite personal responsibility. In this article, we investigate how schools organize responsibility games to respond to this challenge and how these games affect the concept of responsibility. We point to a dislocation in the way parents are assigned responsibility, because the definition of responsibility is not only a question of formulati…
Introduction: The necessity of a new understanding of responsibility for modern society
An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including the concept of responsibility, the discourse about responsibility, and the attribution of responsibility in an interdisciplinary context
Playful hyper-responsibility and the making of a performing audience
The citizen is currently presumed to lack both the will to take responsibility and the imagination to see what his or her responsibility may include. This »lack of responsibility« becomes an object of intervention because function systems see themselves as depending on the citizens: The educational system sees itself as depending on the student to succeed in creating learning; the health system sees itself as depending on the patient to succeed i…
On the history of the form of administrative decisions: How decisions begin to desire uncertainty
In management and organization history, the concept of the decision has often been understood as an ahistorical phenomenon. The changing contexts, technologies, and subjects of decision-making have been thoroughly studied, but decision itself is rarely made an object of historical investigation. Addressing the question of how the very form of the decision changes in the course of history, this article studies the Danish public administration from…
Sociology (24 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Political science (18 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Management and Organizational Studies (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Public relations (8 works) · Business (7 works) · Law (7 works)