Teaser
Every social system draws a line. Inside: recognition, participation, belonging. Outside: invisibility, exclusion, friction. From Parsons’ pattern variables to Luhmann’s autopoietic closures and Nassehi’s digital observations, systems theory reveals how societies generate their most consequential tensions not despite their boundaries, but precisely through them. What happens at the membrane where systems decide who counts and who doesn’t?
Introduction: The Paradox of the Social Boundary
When does a person become visible to a social system? The question seems simple until you realize that most social life operates through selective attention. The economy sees consumers and producers but not lovers or believers. The legal system recognizes plaintiffs and defendants but not artists or athletes in their creative roles. Each functional system in modern society operates with its own internal logic, its own binary code, its own way of determining who belongs and who remains outside.
This is the core insight of social systems theory as developed by Talcott Parsons, refined by Niklas Luhmann, and extended by contemporary theorists like Armin Nassehi. These scholars understood that social friction—the resistance, tension, and conflict we experience daily—often emerges not from malicious actors or failed institutions but from the structural properties of how systems draw boundaries, process information, and exclude what they cannot recognize.
The concept of the social system itself has evolved dramatically. Parsons (1951) conceived of societies as integrated wholes stabilized through shared values and normative consensus. Luhmann (1984, 1995) shifted the focus radically: systems are not containers of people or norms but self-reproducing operations that construct their own boundaries through communication. More recently, Nassehi (2019) has explored how digital technologies create new observation infrastructures that fundamentally alter what systems can include and exclude.
This article examines how inclusion and exclusion work as system-generating operations, how boundaries function as membranes that both filter and produce meaning, and how binary codes create friction zones where conflicts necessarily emerge. We explore these dynamics across micro-level encounters, meso-level organizational contexts, and macro-level societal structures—revealing how systems theory offers critical insights into the production of social difference, inequality, and resistance.
Methods Window
This article synthesizes theoretical insights following a Grounded Theory approach adapted for conceptual analysis. Rather than analyzing empirical data through open, axial, and selective coding, we trace theoretical arguments across classic and contemporary systems theory literature, identifying core categories—inclusion/exclusion, boundaries as membranes, binary coding—and examining their relationships through systematic comparison.
The analysis draws on canonical texts in systems theory while remaining attentive to critical extensions and contemporary applications. We compare Parsonian structural-functionalism with Luhmannian autopoiesis and examine how recent theorists navigate tensions between abstraction and concrete social phenomena. Key limitations include the predominantly European and North American theoretical tradition, which may not adequately capture non-Western conceptualizations of social boundaries, and the challenge of translating highly abstract systems vocabulary into accessible analytical categories without losing conceptual precision.
Assessment target: This article aims for the analytical depth and theoretical rigor appropriate for BA Sociology (7th semester)—Goal grade: 1.3 (Sehr gut).
Evidence from the Classics: Parsons and Luhmann
Parsons: Pattern Variables and System Integration
Talcott Parsons’ structural-functional approach established foundational concepts for understanding how social systems maintain boundaries. In “The Social System,” Parsons (1951) introduced pattern variables as binary choices that orient action: universalism versus particularism, achievement versus ascription, affective neutrality versus affectivity, specificity versus diffuseness, and self-orientation versus collectivity-orientation. These dichotomies function as filters determining which actors and actions gain recognition within specific institutional contexts.
Critically, Parsons understood inclusion not as simple membership but as institutionalized role occupancy. One becomes included in the economic system by performing producer or consumer roles; in the kinship system through family relations; in the educational system through teacher-student dynamics. Exclusion, correspondingly, meant the absence of institutionalized role access—what Parsons termed “anomie” or normative breakdown.
The Parsonian framework emphasized equilibrium and integration, viewing boundaries as functionally necessary for system differentiation. However, critics have noted this approach tends to naturalize existing exclusions and minimize power dynamics. Lockwood (1964) distinguished social integration (relations among actors) from system integration (relations among parts of social systems), revealing tensions Parsons’ framework obscured. The model struggles to explain how systems change boundaries or how excluded actors mobilize to challenge existing demarcations.
Luhmann: Autopoiesis and the Production of Difference
Niklas Luhmann revolutionized systems theory by rejecting Parsons’ normative integration model entirely. For Luhmann (1984, 1995), social systems are not containers or structures but ongoing operations of communication that self-referentially reproduce their own boundaries. This concept of autopoiesis—borrowed from biologists Maturana and Varela—means systems define themselves through their own operations rather than through external determination.
Luhmann’s radical move was to theorize systems as consisting not of people but of communications. Individuals exist in the environment of social systems, and inclusion means having communications attributed to functional system operations. The economic system includes communications about payments; the legal system includes communications about legal/illegal determinations; the scientific system includes communications about truth claims. Each system operates through a specific binary code—payment/non-payment, legal/illegal, true/false—that filters what can be recognized as relevant.
This perspective fundamentally reframes exclusion. You are not excluded from the economy because someone keeps you out; you are excluded when your communications cannot be processed as economic operations. The homeless person is excluded not primarily through active rejection but through systemic inability to participate in payment communications. Luhmann (1995) termed this “exklusion”—a condition where individuals fall outside the operational boundaries of multiple functional systems simultaneously, becoming systemically invisible.
Luhmann’s framework reveals how boundaries are generative rather than merely restrictive. System boundaries create distinctions that make observation possible. Yet critics argue this formalism evacuates questions of power, agency, and normative evaluation. How can we critique unjust exclusions if systems simply operate according to their internal logic? Luhmann would respond that critique itself operates within a system (morality, politics, or law) using its own binary code—but this meta-theoretical move can feel like an evasion of concrete inequalities.
Evidence from Contemporary Theorists: Nassehi, Stichweh, and Farzin
Nassehi: Digital Observation and Pattern Recognition
Armin Nassehi extends Luhmannian systems theory into the digital age, arguing that computational technologies represent a new form of observational infrastructure. In “Patterns: Theory of the Digital Society,” Nassehi (2019) proposes that digitalization does not simply add new technologies to existing social structures but fundamentally alters how systems observe and process information.
Digital systems operate through pattern recognition—identifying regularities across massive datasets and using these patterns to make predictions and classifications. This creates new inclusion/exclusion dynamics. Algorithmic credit scoring includes or excludes based on correlation patterns invisible to traditional assessment. Predictive policing concentrates surveillance on populations flagged by historical data patterns, creating feedback loops that reinforce exclusion. Platform recommendation systems include certain voices in circulation while algorithmically suppressing others.
Nassehi argues these digital patterns do not replace but layer onto existing functional differentiation. The economy now operates through both traditional payment communication and algorithmic market coordination. Law incorporates automated decision systems alongside human judgment. Yet digital observation creates particular friction zones: individuals may be excluded from services through algorithmic determinations they cannot comprehend or contest. The boundary becomes opaque even as it grows more consequential.
Stichweh: Global Systems and Multiple Modernities
Rudolf Stichweh has extended systems theory to analyze globalization and the emergence of world society. Stichweh (2000, 2007) argues that functional systems like science, economy, and art have become genuinely global in scope, operating according to their binary codes across national boundaries. Yet this does not produce homogeneous inclusion. Instead, global systems create massive inequalities in access, where core regions experience high connectivity while peripheries face systematic exclusion from functional participation.
Stichweh’s work on “multiple inclusion” reveals how modern differentiated societies require individuals to participate across multiple functional systems simultaneously—being economic actors, legal subjects, educational participants, political citizens. Exclusion from one system (say, education) creates cascading exclusions from others (economy, politics). This multi-dimensional nature of contemporary exclusion generates compound disadvantages.
The concept of “Weltgesellschaft” (world society) highlights how system boundaries and territorial boundaries operate according to different logics. A scientist in Lagos communicates within the same global scientific system as one in Boston, yet faces vastly different resource access. Global functional systems create friction precisely where their universal operational codes encounter uneven structural conditions.
Farzin: Inclusion/Exclusion as Paradoxical Unity
Sina Farzin’s work examines the conceptual and normative tensions within systems-theoretical treatments of inclusion and exclusion. Farzin (2006) argues that contemporary welfare states face a paradox: their inclusion programs often reproduce exclusion by marking certain populations as requiring special integration measures, thereby stigmatizing them as deviant from normal inclusion patterns.
This paradox reveals how inclusion/exclusion cannot be separated but form a unified operation. Every act of including some communications/actors simultaneously excludes others. The welfare system includes benefit recipients precisely by marking them as not fully included in the labor market. Anti-discrimination law includes protected categories while potentially reifying the very classifications it seeks to overcome.
Farzin’s analysis underscores how friction emerges from the double-bind of simultaneously needing boundaries (for system operations) and seeking to minimize their exclusionary effects. Any attempt to reduce exclusion through expanded inclusion criteria shifts but does not eliminate the boundary, creating new friction zones.
Neighboring Disciplines: Psychological, Philosophical, and Political Perspectives
Psychological Dimensions: Recognition and Identity
Social psychology has extensively documented how exclusion operates at micro-interactional levels, complementing systems-theoretical macro analysis. Goffman (1963) described how stigma marks certain individuals as excluded from “normal” social interaction, while Baumeister and Leary (1995) demonstrated humans’ fundamental psychological need for belonging. These insights suggest that system-level exclusion translates into individual experiences of misrecognition, marginalization, and psychological harm.
Recognition theory, particularly Honneth (1992), provides a normative framework for evaluating exclusion patterns that purely systems-theoretical approaches struggle to generate. Honneth argues that human flourishing requires recognition across three spheres: love (personal relationships), rights (legal standing), and solidarity (social esteem). Systematic exclusion denies recognition, causing both psychological suffering and political injustice.
Yet systems theory asks: whose recognition counts? Recognition itself operates through social systems (law grants rights recognition; culture grants esteem recognition; intimacy grants emotional recognition). The friction emerges when individuals seek recognition from systems operating according to codes that structurally exclude their forms of communication or identity performance.
Philosophical Considerations: Boundaries and Difference
Continental philosophy offers critical perspectives on how boundaries produce meaning. Derrida’s (1982) concept of “différance” suggests that meaning emerges not from positive content but from systems of differences—similar to Luhmann’s emphasis on distinctions. Yet Derrida radically questions the stability of any boundary, showing how distinctions necessarily contain traces of what they exclude, making all boundaries simultaneously necessary and impossible to maintain purely.
Agamben (1998) explored how exclusion operates through the production of “bare life”—existence excluded from political recognition yet included as objects of sovereign power. The refugee, the stateless person, the concentration camp inmate: these figures exist in a zone of exclusion-within-inclusion, subject to systemic violence precisely because they fall outside normal legal categories while remaining within territorial boundaries. This “state of exception” reveals how exclusion is not simply absence from systems but a specific mode of negative inclusion.
Butler (1993) examined how boundaries are performatively produced through reiterated norms that determine whose lives and identities count as recognizable. Gender norms exclude non-normative performances not through explicit prohibition but through rendering them unintelligible. The boundary is not a fixed line but an ongoing process of normative iteration that must constantly reproduce itself—creating friction zones where alternative performances challenge dominant codes.
Political-Economic Contexts: Power and Structured Exclusion
Critical sociology and political economy emphasize how system boundaries reflect and reproduce power relations. Bourdieu (1984) showed how cultural capital functions as a boundary mechanism, excluding working-class individuals from fields requiring specific cultural competencies. The boundary appears neutral (one simply lacks the required cultural knowledge) while systematically reproducing class hierarchies.
Feminist and postcolonial scholars have demonstrated how ostensibly universal system codes encode particular standpoints. Young (1990) argued that supposedly impartial legal and political systems systematically exclude marginalized groups through false universalism—claiming neutrality while embedding dominant group norms as standards. The “universal citizen” of liberal political theory historically excluded women, non-property owners, and racialized populations not through explicit prohibition but through definition of citizenship criteria.
Fraser and Honneth (2003) debated whether misrecognition or maldistribution constitutes the fundamental dimension of injustice, but both agree that contemporary exclusion operates simultaneously through cultural and economic systems. The frictions are compounded: economic exclusion produces cultural misrecognition (poverty stigma) while cultural exclusion produces economic disadvantage (discrimination limiting opportunities).
Mini-Meta Review: Recent Findings on System Boundaries and Friction (2010-2025)
Synthesizing recent systems-theoretical and empirical research reveals five key findings:
Finding 1: Digital boundaries are computationally opaque yet consequentially determinative. Algorithms create inclusion/exclusion patterns based on data proxies and correlation patterns that affected individuals cannot observe, comprehend, or effectively challenge. This opacity generates distinct friction—not the visible conflict of denied entry but the invisible sorting that distributes life chances through inscrutable computational processes (Eubanks 2018; Noble 2018; Benjamin 2019).
Finding 2: Multiple exclusion produces compound disadvantage across systems. Empirical studies confirm Stichweh’s theoretical claim: exclusion from education predicts exclusion from formal economy, which correlates with exclusion from political participation and legal protections. These exclusions are not additive but multiplicative, creating populations systematically invisible across functional domains (Silver 2007; Kronauer 2010; Leisering 2019).
Finding 3: Inclusion programs may reproduce boundaries they seek to dissolve. Welfare systems, diversity initiatives, and integration programs often mark populations as “special cases” requiring intervention, thereby stigmatizing them as outside normal inclusion patterns. The paradox: mechanisms designed to expand inclusion can reinforce the very distinctions they aim to overcome (Farzin 2006; Scherr 2016).
Finding 4: Global systems create fractal inequality patterns. Functional systems operate globally but with extreme variance in access and capability across regions. The global scientific system includes researchers worldwide yet concentrates resources, prestige, and agenda-setting power in Global North institutions. This generates friction between the system’s universalistic code (true/false) and structural conditions enabling participation (Stichweh 2007; Go 2016).
Contradiction: While systems theory emphasizes operational closure and self-reference, empirical research increasingly documents how systems’ external environments materially constrain their operations. Climate change is disrupting economic operations; demographic shifts are overwhelming welfare systems; migration is challenging political boundary definitions. The boundary is both operationally necessary and empirically porous.
Implication: Future systems research must theorize the co-constitution of internal operations and environmental conditions without abandoning insights about functional differentiation. Boundaries are simultaneously real (as operational necessities) and fictional (as idealizations constantly breached). Friction emerges precisely at this intersection of analytical necessity and empirical complexity.
Practice Heuristics: Navigating System Boundaries
Based on systems-theoretical insights, five practical strategies for analyzing and navigating inclusion/exclusion dynamics:
Heuristic 1: Identify the operative binary code. When analyzing an exclusion situation, ask: What is the system’s binary code? Legal/illegal, payment/non-payment, true/false, government/opposition? Understanding the code reveals what communications the system can recognize and what necessarily remains invisible. This shifts analysis from normative judgment (exclusion is bad) to structural diagnosis (exclusion is operationally inevitable given this code).
Heuristic 2: Map cascading exclusions across systems. Analyze how exclusion from one functional system produces exclusions from others. Educational exclusion limits economic participation; economic exclusion undermines political voice; legal exclusion compounds both. Mapping these cascades reveals intervention points and system interdependencies.
Heuristic 3: Examine boundary maintenance mechanisms. How does the system reproduce its boundary over time? Through credentials (educational certificates), documentation (legal papers), financial instruments (credit scores), or normative performance (cultural competency)? These mechanisms are both the system’s operational infrastructure and potential sites for contestation or transformation.
Heuristic 4: Look for friction zones where systems conflict. Systems operate according to incompatible logics, creating friction when they intersect. Economy demands profit maximization; law demands rights protection; science demands truth regardless of economic consequences. These frictions are not failures but structural features generating ongoing negotiation and conflict.
Heuristic 5: Recognize that inclusion/exclusion is never complete. Boundaries are not walls but membranes—semi-permeable, constantly maintained through ongoing operations. This means exclusions are neither natural nor permanent. They require active reproduction, creating opportunities for challenge, negotiation, and incremental boundary shifts.
Testable Hypotheses and Research Directions
Several hypotheses emerge from systems-theoretical analysis of inclusion/exclusion:
[HYPOTHESE 1]: Organizations operating across multiple functional systems will experience heightened boundary conflicts. For example, universities must simultaneously satisfy economic efficiency (payment code), scientific validity (true/false code), educational formation (teacher/student role code), and political accountability (government/opposition). The more system codes an organization must satisfy, the greater the internal friction and boundary ambiguity. This could be operationalized by comparing organizational conflict intensity across single-system versus multi-system organizations.
[HYPOTHESE 2]: Digital platforms create novel friction zones by operating across traditional system boundaries without respecting their binary codes. Social media platforms process scientific communications (true/false), economic transactions (payment/non-payment), political expressions (government/opposition), and intimate interactions (love/non-love) within a single infrastructure governed by engagement metrics. This hypothesis suggests platform friction emerges from code collision—operational hint: analyze platform controversies to identify which system codes are clashing.
[HYPOTHESE 3]: Populations excluded from multiple functional systems simultaneously will develop alternative coordination mechanisms outside system boundaries. This “parallele Gesellschaft” (parallel society) hypothesis predicts that compound exclusion generates informal economies, underground legal systems, alternative educational networks—not as deviance but as rational responses to systemic exclusion. Operational hint: ethnographic research in multiply-excluded communities documenting non-system-coded coordination practices.
[HYPOTHESE 4]: System boundaries become more rigid under perceived threat but more porous under routinized stability. Legal systems tighten inclusion criteria during perceived migration “crises”; economic systems raise barriers during financial instability; political systems restrict participation when legitimacy is questioned. Conversely, periods of stability see incremental boundary expansion. Operational hint: longitudinal analysis of inclusion/exclusion criteria variation correlated with systemic stability indicators.
[HYPOTHESE 5]: The more abstract a system’s binary code, the greater its potential for global scope but the more friction with local lifeworlds. Science’s true/false code operates globally with relatively less friction than law’s legal/illegal code, which remains deeply tied to territorial jurisdiction. Money travels more easily than legitimacy. Operational hint: compare functional systems’ globalization extent against their code abstraction level and friction intensity with local contexts.
Summary & Outlook
Social systems theory reveals inclusion and exclusion as constitutive operations rather than moral failures. From Parsons’ pattern variables through Luhmann’s autopoietic boundaries to Nassehi’s digital patterns, we see how systems necessarily create distinctions that filter what can be recognized. These boundaries function as membranes—not walls—producing meaning through selective permeability while generating friction zones where different system logics collide or where excluded communications/actors resist their invisibility.
Contemporary challenges intensify these dynamics. Digital technologies create computationally opaque boundaries that distribute life chances through inscrutable algorithms. Globalization produces systems with universal operational codes confronting radically uneven structural conditions. Multiple exclusions compound disadvantage across functional domains. Welfare and inclusion programs paradoxically reproduce the boundaries they seek to dissolve.
Yet systems theory also suggests that boundaries are never complete or permanent. They require constant operational reproduction, creating opportunities for challenge and transformation. Friction emerges not as system failure but as the necessary consequence of differentiation—the price of having specialized functional systems at all.
Future research must address several tensions. How can systems theory account for power and inequality without abandoning its insights about operational closure? How do environmental constraints (climate, resources, demographics) force systems to adapt their boundaries? What new forms of inclusion and exclusion emerge through artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and planetary-scale computation? How do movements for social justice navigate system boundaries to achieve recognition and redistribution?
The concept of friction itself deserves deeper theoretical attention. Friction is not simply resistance or conflict but the characteristic experience of living across multiple system boundaries—being simultaneously included and excluded, recognized in some domains while invisible in others, finding one’s communications processed by some systems while rejected by others. Understanding friction means understanding how social systems produce the very tensions they must then manage, how boundaries generate the differences they claim merely to recognize, how exclusion is not peripheral but central to how modern societies operate.
Sociology Brain Teasers
Reflection 1: How would you redesign a university’s admissions system if you took seriously Luhmann’s claim that systems consist of communications, not people? What would “including a communication” rather than “admitting a student” look like operationally?
Provocation 1: If every act of inclusion simultaneously excludes, is the goal of an inclusive society coherent or contradictory? Does pursuing universal inclusion simply shift boundaries rather than eliminate them?
Micro: When someone speaks in a meeting but their contribution is ignored—not rejected, just not responded to—which system boundary has excluded their communication? How does micro-level communicative invisibility relate to macro-level systemic exclusion?
Meso: Organizations often have diversity officers tasked with expanding inclusion. From a systems perspective, does creating a specialized role for inclusion inadvertently mark inclusion as an exception to normal operations rather than a standard practice? How might this reproduce the boundary between “normal” and “diverse” employees?
Macro: Nassehi argues digital patterns create new observation infrastructures. If AI systems increasingly determine who gets loans, jobs, parole, and social services, does this represent a new functional system emerging (algorithmic governance) or existing systems transforming their operational codes?
Provocation 2: Luhmann claims systems observe their environments but cannot directly access them (operational closure). If this is true, can systems ever truly include previously excluded populations, or can they only create new internal representations that claim to correspond to external realities?
Reflection 2: The refugee represents someone excluded from multiple systems (political, legal, economic) simultaneously yet physically present within territorial boundaries. What does this figure reveal about the relationship between system boundaries and spatial boundaries? How do systems handle the presence of those they cannot process through their codes?
Reflection 3: If you were designing a protest movement to challenge economic inequality using systems-theoretical insights, would you try to change the economic system’s binary code (payment/non-payment), pressure other systems (law, politics) to constrain economic operations, or create alternative coordination mechanisms outside system boundaries entirely? What are the strategic implications of each approach?
Transparency & AI Disclosure
This article was created through human-AI collaboration. A human researcher initiated the topic and framing, specifying focus on social systems theory (Parsons, Luhmann, Nassehi) and the phenomena of inclusion/exclusion, boundaries, and friction. The AI assistant (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Anthropic) drafted the article structure, synthesized theoretical literature, and composed the text based on training data through January 2025.
The workflow involved: (1) initial conceptual outlining drawing on systems theory literature, (2) section-by-section drafting with attention to theoretical accuracy and accessibility, (3) integration of classic and contemporary sources, (4) development of practice heuristics and hypotheses, and (5) creation of brain teasers to stimulate further reflection. The human researcher provided the theoretical framework and quality standards; the AI performed synthesis, composition, and formatting.
Key limitations: The AI’s knowledge derives from training data and may not reflect the most recent theoretical developments published after January 2025. Theoretical nuances in Luhmann’s extensive oeuvre may be simplified for accessibility. The article draws primarily on German and English-language theory, potentially underrepresenting non-Western systems-theoretical traditions. Citations indicate authors and publication years but readers should verify specific textual claims against original sources for scholarly use.
Readers are encouraged to engage with primary texts, consider alternative theoretical frameworks, and apply critical judgment in evaluating the arguments presented. This article aims to stimulate thinking about systems, boundaries, and friction rather than provide definitive interpretations.
Literature
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press.
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard University Press.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge.
Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of Philosophy. University of Chicago Press.
Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. St. Martin’s Press.
Farzin, S. (2006). Inklusion/Exklusion und die Paradoxien der Wohlfahrt. In H. Bude & A. Willisch (Eds.), Das Problem der Exklusion (pp. 89-104). Hamburger Edition.
Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. (2003). Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. Verso.
Go, J. (2016). Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190625139.001.0001
Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice-Hall.
Honneth, A. (1992). The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. MIT Press.
Kronauer, M. (2010). Exklusion: Die Gefährdung des Sozialen im hoch entwickelten Kapitalismus. Campus Verlag.
Leisering, L. (2019). The Global Rise of Social Cash Transfers: How States and International Organizations Constructed a New Instrument for Combating Poverty. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198834625.001.0001
Lockwood, D. (1964). Social integration and system integration. In G. K. Zollschan & W. Hirsch (Eds.), Explorations in Social Change (pp. 244-257). Houghton Mifflin.
Luhmann, N. (1984). Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Suhrkamp.
Luhmann, N. (1995). Social Systems. Stanford University Press.
Nassehi, A. (2019). Muster: Theorie der digitalen Gesellschaft. C. H. Beck. https://www.chbeck.de/nassehi-muster/product/28126
Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press.
Parsons, T. (1951). The Social System. Free Press.
Scherr, A. (2016). Diskriminierung und soziale Ungleichheiten. In A. Scherr, A. El-Mafaalani, & G. Yüksel (Eds.), Handbuch Diskriminierung (pp. 39-58). Springer VS. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-11119-9_3
Silver, H. (2007). The process of social exclusion: The dynamics of an evolving concept. Chronic Poverty Research Centre Working Paper, 95.
Stichweh, R. (2000). Die Weltgesellschaft: Soziologische Analysen. Suhrkamp.
Stichweh, R. (2007). The eigenstructures of world society and the regional cultures of the world. In I. Rossi (Ed.), Frontiers of Globalization Research (pp. 133-149). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-36756-6_7
Young, I. M. (1990). Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton University Press.
Note: This is a sociological project, not a clinical-psychological one. It may contain inspirations for (student) life, but it will not and cannot replace psychosocial counseling or professional care.
Check Log
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Date: 2025-11-11
Assessment Target: BA Sociology (7th semester)—Goal grade: 1.3 (Sehr gut)
Publishable Prompt
Natural Language Version:
Create a blog post about social systems theory (Parsons, Luhmann, Nassehi) focusing on inclusion/exclusion, boundaries as membranes, and friction for socialfriction.com (English, orange-dominant color scheme with blue/teal accents). Use Grounded Theory as methodological basis for synthesizing theoretical literature. Integrate classic theorists (minimum 2: Parsons, Luhmann) and modern theorists (minimum 2: Nassehi, Stichweh, Farzin) with indirect citations (Author Year format, no page numbers in text). Include neighboring disciplines (psychology: recognition theory; philosophy: Derrida, Agamben, Butler; political economy: Bourdieu, Young, Fraser). Add 5-8 Brain Teasers (mixed: 2 reflection, 2 provocation, 4 micro/meso/macro perspective questions). Target grade: 1.3 for BA Sociology 7th semester. Workflow: v0 draft → contradiction check → optimization → integrated version with QA. Header image 4:3 ratio with alt text, AI Disclosure 90-120 words, strong H1 title, Summary & Outlook paragraph, 5 testable hypotheses marked [HYPOTHESE], 5 practice heuristics, complete APA 7 literature section with publisher-first links.
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