Why Do Sociology and Systems Theory Connect?

This book begins with a puzzle that has occupied the author across more than two decades of research: why would a discipline as resolutely humanistic as sociology turn to the abstract vocabulary of systems theory? The association is, on its face, unpromising. Systems theory evokes engineers and machines and is associated with control mechanisms, feedback loops, and the optimization of technical processes. Sociology, by contrast, evokes human beings in all their irreducible complexity—the meanings people make, the structures that constrain them, and the possibilities they open and foreclose through their actions. The disciplines seem to belong to different intellectual universes. Why connect them?