Social Theory and Self-Organization: Toward a Sociology of Postmodernism

Abstract Significant changes which represent a linguistic and semantic turn in social theory occurred between in the mid 1970's and the early 1980's. This turn indicates the importance of the social and public dimensions of symbolic meaning that has been distorted functionally by orthodox modernization theory. Modern society is characterized as penetrating the idea of functional primacy into various areas of social life, but in the 1980's skepticism about modernity increased markedly and fluctuation of modernity was resulted. In this paper I discuss the problem of symbolic meaning and fluctuation of modernity from the viewpoint of self-organization paradigm which emphasizes ‘order from fluctuation’ and self-reference, and review the possibility of a postmodern sociology through claiming the necessity to ask how anti-control systems can be built.