Context analysis, cybernetics and reconstructive social research

The abstraction of Luhmann's systems theory only makes sense if systems are understood as empirical objects which, although not immediately visible and tangible as relational entities, can still be reconstructed in principle. Both in terms of its own theory development and in the context of an increasingly externally funded research landscape, sociological systems theory has so far made little effort to methodologise its relationship between theoretical work and empirical research.

In the last 20 years, qualitative and reconstructive social research has increasingly raised the question of how polyphonic, polycontextural and ambiguous relationships can be researched. This is where our project comes in: With contexture analysis, we are developing a methodological approach that reconstructs system dynamics on the basis of ambiguities.

At the centre of our methodological considerations is Gotthard Günther's theory of polycontexturality. With the concepts of contexture and transjunctional operation, a lean but at the same time highly abstract metatheory is proposed that enables complex social processes to be analysed.

Contexture analysis also takes up the concept of polyphony (BACHTIN), which is becoming increasingly prominent in linguistics and literary studies, in order to show how protocol texts can be analysed in terms of a multivalent hermeneutics. This theoretical perspective makes it possible to methodologically grasp the co-presence of different speaker positions, institutional logics and the associated fractured self and world relations.

Contexture analysis has proven to be particularly fruitful in various fields of research:

• Organisational and management research: analysis of the interweaving of different institutional logics in formal organisations
• Research into religious self and world relations: Investigating complex spiritual practices and their appropriation in Western contexts
• Psychiatric practice: analysing the ambiguity in the expressions of mentally ill people
• Family business: Analysing the entanglement of family logic and business logic

These empirical applications show that contexture analysis is particularly powerful where conventional social science methods reach their limits: in analysing ambiguity, paradox and the simultaneity of different horizons of meaning.

Contexture analysis thus not only opens up new perspectives for empirical social research, but also offers a fruitful connection to current discussions in epistemology and methodology: it enables empirical research into complex relations of reflection and multiple rationalities in modern societies, it overcomes the often artificial separation between qualitative and quantitative research through its focus on formal relations and it creates a bridge between system-theoretical approaches and empirical research.

• Jansen, Till; Vogd, Werner (2022): Contexture analysis: theory and method of systemic social research. Springer VS.
• Vogd, Werner; Harth, Jonathan (2019): Contexture analysis: a methodology for reconstructing polycontextural relationships, demonstrated using the example of transgression in the teacher-student relationship in Tibetan Buddhism. FQS Forum Qualitative Social Research, Volume 20, No. 1, Art. 21.
• Jansen, Till; von Schlippe, Arist; Vogd, Werner (2015): Contexture analysis - a proposal for reconstructive social research in organisational contexts. FQS Forum Qualitative Social Research, Volume 16, No. 1, Art. 4.
• Vogd, Werner; Harth, Jonathan; Ofner, Ulrike (2015): Doing religion in the Phowa course: praxeological and reflection-logical studies on "conscious dying" in Diamond Way Buddhism. FQS Forum Qualitative Social Research, Volume 16, No. 3, Art. 17.
• Jansen, Till; Feißt, Martin; Vogd, Werner (2020): "Logical condensation" - On the interpretation of ambiguity in contexture analysis using the example of a schizophrenic patient in forensic psychiatry. FQS Forum Qualitative Social Research, Volume 21, No. 3, Art. 13.
• Vogd, Werner; Feißt, Martin; Jansen, Till (2021): Effectiveness of therapeutic arrangements in a coercive context - a contextual analysis of the therapy of a paedophile man in a correctional facility. FQS Forum Qualitative Social Research, Volume 22, No. 3, Art. 18.
• Vogd, Werner; Harth, Jonathan (2023): The consciousness of machines - the mechanics of consciousness. Reflecting on the future of artificial and human intelligence with Gotthard Günther. Open Access, Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft.

• Duration: ongoing
• Responsible: Chair of Sociology