Center for Sociocybernetics Studies Bonn

The Center for Sociocybernetics Studies Bonn was founded 2008, and grew out of the Fraunhofer Institut für Intelligente Analyse- und Informationssysteme (IAIS). It is part of the Association "Cultures of Knowledge" ("Wissenskulturen e.V."). The research focus of the center is the application of systems thinking and cybernetic principles in order to analyse and handle social phenomena regarding their complexity and dynamics. The following aspects can be emphasised that may be seen as characteristic of our research approach:

Systems: Research interest focused on handling complexity. A systemic view is an observation attempting to trace the diversity of interaction in reality instead of analytically isolating individual causal relations and exploring them in their entire depth. Systems are defined by a certain form of distinction from their environment.
Processuality: Cybernetics "treats not things but ways of behaving. It does not ask 'What is a thing?’ but ‘What does it do?'" (Ashby 1956). It is not the nature, the properties, the materiality of objects that forms the centre of its interest but their forms of operation.
Receprocity: It is not causality but the mutual influence of dynamic self-regulating systems that research focuses on. With a cybernetic approach, one has opted for the examination of the basic forms from which the internal order of a system results rather than for observing individual properties.
Self-referentiality: To Heinz von Foerster, this is the fundamental principle of cybernetic thought. He speaks of circularity, referring to all concepts that can be applied on themselves, processes in which a state ultimately reproduces itself. (v. Foerster 1993, p. 73). Luhmann adopts this concept under the headword "self-referentiality".
Information: System processes, especially the relation between the system and the environment, are understood as "informational processes" in which contingencies exist and selection occurs rather than as necessities in the sense of a strict causality. Information is often referred to as a function of the organisation of systems. Some natural scientists regard information as a "third factor" next to matter and consciousness (Weizsäcker 1974) or matter and energy (Stonier 990).
Regulation: The purposeful influencing of social phenomena always amounts to an attempt to intervene in highly complex systems with self-organising (dissipative) structures. These systems respond to attempts to regulate them coming from their environment only on the basis of their internal structure. Thus regulation has to handle the phenomenon of the determinedness of systems’ structures.
[Read More on basic sociocybernetics principles..... - also available in German und Spanish as pdf: ]

The activities of the Center take place in an area of intersection of the following institutions:

Fraunhofer Institut für Intelligente Analyse-
und Informationssysteme (IAIS),
Sankt Augustin,Germany

Research Committee 51 on Sociocybernetics
of the International Sociological Association (ISA)

AGENDA Team Research + Consult GmbH, Bonn, Germany

Laboratorio de Investigación y Desarrollo en Comunicación Compleja
(labCOMplex), Centro de Investigación Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias
y Humanidades, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
Ciudad de México, México

International Federation for Systems Research

ISSC-International Social Science Council of the UNESCO

Universidad Zaragoza, Grupo de Estudios Sociales y
Económicos del Tercer Sector, Zaragoza, España