social system

is a system that uses communication in its autopoiesis. While there would be no communication without minds, communication does not 'follow' from minds and cannot be 'reduced to it, as if minds 'entailed' communication.

Systems theory and network analysis dispense with 'actor' and 'agency' as basic sociological concepts. For Luhmann, persons are systems whose autopoiesis is accomplished by consciousness. This means they produce mental states from other mental states. In contrast, social systems use communication in their own autopoiesis. while there would be no communication without minds, communication does not 'follow' from minds and cannot be 'reduced to it, as if minds 'entailed' commuication. Persons cannot really communicate... they can say or write somehting, but what happens next, if anything, is decided by the behavior of communication, not by mental states and consciousness' (Fuchs 'beyond agency').

is an organized pattern of behavior including actions, interactions, roles, symbolic meanings, choices, and so forth, but not individual human beings.

Luhmann defines social systems as organized patterns of behavior. As such, they include 'actions, interactions, roles, symbolic meanings, choices, and so forth' (Habermas and Luhmann, 1971, p.36... translated in Holmes and Larmore , 1982, p. xx)-but not individual human beings' (net)

is not a natural reality, but rather a figment of thought, a relation between concepts, not actual things.

I do not consider that social systems are a natural reality. In my view, the facts of ethnography and of history can only appear to be ordered in a systematic way if we impose upon these facts a figment of thought. We first devise for ourselves a set of verbal categories which are nicely arranged to form an ordered system, and we then fit the facts to the verbal categories, and hey presto the facts are 'seen' to be systemically ordered! But in that case the system is a matter of the relations between concepts and not (Leach x... xii)

social system, n.Definitions

social system