Autopoiesis - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

Autopoiesis refers to a self-organizing and self-reproducing system, where the fundamental units are communications rather than individuals or actions, allowing social systems to actively reproduce their own structures through a chain of communications. AI generated definition based on: International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001 How useful is this definition? You might find these chapters and articles relevant to this topic. Chapter Autopoiesis, or ‘self-production,’ is a concept introduced in the 1970s by the biologists Maturana and Varela to differentiate the living from the nonliving. An autopoietic system was defined as a network of inter-related component-producing processes such that the components in interaction generate the same network that produced them. Although they considered the concept applicable only in biology, and not in the social sciences, an interesting ‘theory transfer’ was made by Luhmann (1988). He defended the quite novel thesis that,

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