From coordination problems to complexity processing – second-order observation of inter-administrative relations

Abstract

This paper offers a conceptual analysis of inter-administrative relations by reconstructing them as an object constituted through analytical observation. Drawing explicitly on Niklas Luhmann’s Social Systems Theory, it employs second-order observation as a methodological framework to examine how inter-administrative relations are made observable within different analytical traditions. It first analyzes how inter-administrative relations are constituted within Actor-Centered Institutionalism, showing that they emerge through the distinction between coordination success and coordination failure and appear predominantly as problems or solutions of policy implementation. In a second step, systems theory is employed as a reflexive observational methodology. Using the system/environment distinction, public administration is observed as a decision system. Inter-administrative relations can then be described as forms that stabilize connectivity between differentiated decision contexts under conditions of environmental complexity. By systematically varying the observational distinctions through which inter-administrative relations are constituted, the paper demonstrates that they are not given empirical objects but take on different analytical forms depending on how they are observed: either as a normative category for evaluating coordination or as conditions of organizational decision-making. In this way, the contribution advances both systems-theoretical and administrative research. It demonstrates how second-order observation can be used as a transdisciplinary methodological tool to reconstruct and compare established analytical frameworks. It further shows that empirical diagnoses and reform proposals are effects of specific observational distinctions.