Vladislav Valentinov

Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies | IAMO · Department of Structural Development of Farms and Rural Areas

The prevailing theories of the firm acknowledge the importance of trust and loyalty but neglect such behaviour in the substance of their analyses. The present paper unravels this paradox by drawing on Niklas Luhmann's groundbreaking insight that the complexity-reducing function of social systems leads them to neglect their critical environmental de...

This paper develops an organizational economics explanation for agricultural cooperatives by building upon the transaction cost theory of family farms. According to this theory, the importance of family farms in Western agriculture is a result of the low feasibility of hierarchical organization in agricultural production due to supervision and moni...

This paper explores the way the idea of sustainability is linked to categories traditionally examined by the general systems theory—the categories of system, environment, and complexity. Toward this end, the paper builds upon the social systems theory of Niklas Luhmann to explain the nature of the trade-off between complexity and sustainability. Ex...

We explore the cross-fertilization potential between stakeholder theory and Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory. Social systems, such as corporations or nonprofits, are defined by complexity reduction and operational closure, which may render them insensitive to their environment and undermine their sustainability. This vision resonates with sta...

Stakeholder theorists have traditionally objected to the neoclassical conception of the firm as a vehicle for maximizing profit or shareholder wealth, thus opening up space for controversial engagement with neoclassical economics. The present paper fills some of this space by elaborating the parallels between stakeholder theory and classical instit...

IMPACT The article presents and reflects on empirical findings about how Czech municipalities have dealt with the Ukrainian refugee crisis. The findings come from an electronic survey conducted by the authors in co-operation with the Association of Towns and Municipalities of the Czech Republic. Complemented with the results of refugee surveys, the...

As neoliberalism is sinking into disrepute, states are responding to current crises by inroads on basic rights. This constellation adds urgency to the timeworn subject of statehood and its relationship to law and liberty. The paper addresses this subject by enhancing the neoliberal concept of an encased economy with James Coleman's concept of law a...

In Niklas Luhmann’s vision of the modern functionally differentiated society, health presents one of the essential function systems, along with politics, law, economy and science. While he devoted much effort to elaborating the theoretical foundations of the latter function systems, his work on the health system was relatively sparse. This research...

Chester Barnard’s work can be shown to contain subversive elements which accord with the spirit of institutionalist scholarship. Barnard saw corporations as systems of power whose sustainability must be backed by moral resources which are becoming increasingly scarce today. This vision suggests that the core role of corporations may be found to be...

Green public procurement (GPP) is a widely recognized public policy tool that has attracted considerable scholarly research. However, much of this research has paid little attention to the nature of discretionary decision-making on the part of bureaucrats and local politicians; nor has it recognized that a crucial determinant of the implementation...

Advocates of stakeholder theory have long known that grasping its key insights requires a specific worldview that is, unfortunately, still not prevalent within the community of strategic management scholars. We argue that this worldview encompasses a process ontology that is radically different from the substance-ontological outlook typical of the...

Sustainability transitions bring together many different disciplines focussing on the interrelations between the social and the material. The burgeoning field of transition studies is becoming more inter-disciplinary, less normative, less modernist in nature, and more open to both discursive and material dynamics. Social-ecological systems thinking...

Historical institutionalism is increasingly acknowledged as a promising theoretical platform in the field of nonprofit sector studies. The main goal of the paper is to review major applications of historical institutionalism to the nonprofit sector, with a particular focus on how this theoretical platform illuminates the responses of Czech nonprofi...

p>This paper presents a framework for analysing the different ways in which materiality impacts environmental policy and governance. It draws on notions from the wider literature on materiality and integrates relevant insights into a theory on policy and governance. Building on a key distinction between the material and the discursive dimensions of...

Embracing methodological individualism, the mainstream economic theory of the firm has little to say about the precarious nature of the firm's embeddedness in encompassing socioecological systems. The digital transformation of the theory of the firm can address this gap by deconstructing the standpoint of methodological individualism. In transactio...

The paper revisits the fundamental question of the nature of the firm by contrasting two philosophic worldviews suggested by process philosophy and the Luhmannian systems theory. Whereas the former worldview takes reality to be internally related, the latter ones underscores the tendency of social systems, such as firms, to disregard much of this i...

Cooperative organizations are generally capable of accommodating diverse needs of their members. Particularly in today’s agrifood systems, this capacity often makes the governance of cooperatives themselves extraordinarily challenging. To meet some of these challenges, the paper develops a new conceptual approach to cooperative governance by differ...

Background The uptake of green public procurement in the Czech Republic is known to lag behind the European standards. We trace this condition back to the adverse effects of a specific type of decision-making trade-off faced by the Czech public procurement officials, namely the trade-off between stewardship and administrative compliance. The trade-...

The field of paradox studies keeps struggling to put the notion of paradox into the very centre of organizational life and managerial decision-making, with mixed success. We argue that this research ambition can be realized much more effectively by anchoring the field in three interrelated conceptual approaches which build on paradox as the paradig...

In a recent contribution to this journal, Peter Bradley (2021) explores the ways in which new institutional economics and classical institutional economics approach the notion of sustainability. Drawing on insights from both schools of economic thought, Bradley (2021) synthesizes a conceptual framework for understanding sustainable production and c...

This paper explores the potential for stakeholder theory to illuminate what F.A. Hayek called “the knowledge problem”, pertaining to how a society manages to utilize “knowledge not given to anyone in its totality”. According to Hayek, this problem is addressed by the price system, which induces economic actors to harness local and dispersed pieces...

Along with other postcommunist Central and East European countries, the Czech Republic continues to exhibit alarming levels of corruption. The present article draws on unique stakeholder interviews and document analysis to explore the evolving perceptions of corruption by Czech actors who had intimate knowledge of how this practice was occurring in...

In a recent contribution to this journal, Deng et al. (2021) draw on an extensive range of theoretical and empirical literature to make the case for the tendency of social capital resources of agricultural cooperatives in the Western world to decline over time. The present paper revisits this argument by drawing on a Luhmannian systems-theoretic pe...

The paper develops a new conceptual approach exploring how increasing member diversity problems, which negatively affect sustainability of agricultural cooperatives worldwide, can be addressed by cooperative leaders. The key innovation is in introducing the distinction between core and peripheral cooperative activities; core activities are based on...

Background The uptake of green public procurement in the Czech Republic is known to lag behind the European standards. We trace this condition back to the adverse effects of a specific type of decision-making tradeoff faced by the Czech public procurement officials, namely the tradeoff between stewardship and administrative compliance. The tradeoff...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to deepen the understanding of adaptive governance, which is advocated for as a manner to deal with dramatic changes in society and/or environment. To re-think the possible contributions of organizations and organization theory, to adaptive governance. Design/methodology/approach Based on social systems theory...

In the current landscape of management and business ethics scholarship, a prominent type of dissimulation is exemplified by corporate hypocrisy. The concept of corporate hypocrisy brings traditional morality to bear on the institutions of the modern society and thereby emphasizes the contested relationship between the research programs of individua...

In the Western hemisphere, the hybridity of public service delivery is widely acknowledged to generate governance challenges arising from the mutual contestation of the competing institutional logics, such as those of the public and the private for-profit sector. The present paper explores these challenges by means of an in-depth qualitative case s...

In Albania development gaps in the area of food safety are calling for stronger vertical coordination within the agrifood value chains. The paper explores the possibility of vertical coordination being strengthened through the development of agricultural cooperatives and informal farmer groups. In two reported case studies, these organizations have...

Chester Barnard's organisation theory is widely acknowledged to be grounded on a systems-theoretic approach which has however remained largely inchoate. The present paper ventures a hypothetical reconstruction of this approach by identifying the salient parallels between Barnard's thought and Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems as well as Alf...

Purpose Many nonprofit missions and the goals of socially responsible corporations are often found to refer to similar moral ideals related to improving the quality of human life. To take account of this salient fact, the paper aims to theorize the functional equivalence between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the nonprofit sector. Desig...

Many public debates about the societal significance and impact of agriculture are usefully framed by Paul Thompson's distinction between the "agrarian" and the "industrial vision." The key argument of the present paper is that the ongoing debate between these visions goes beyond academic philosophy and has direct effects on the political economy of...

While corporate managers are under moral obligation to run their corporations in a sustainable way, the growing corporate sustainability challenges necessitate the growing complexity of decisions which need to be made by managers. To help managers to deal with these trends, the paper proposes a novel conception of "moral wayfinding", a term inspire...

At the core of ecological economics is the image of the economy as an open system embedded in the natural environment whose carrying capacity is limited. The present paper revisits this image by drawing upon the constructivist implications of Luhmann's social systems theory. To Luhmann, the modern society consists of a multitude of social systems e...

In this article, we draw on established views of CSR dysfunctionalities to show how and why CSR is regularly observed to be both shaped by and supportive of capitalism. We proceed to show that these dysfunctionalities are maintained by both the pro- and anticapitalist approaches to CSR, both of which imply an ill-defined separation of the economy a...

Farmer cooperatives may promote technology adoption in agricultural production, which, in turn, increases crop productivity and farmers' income. However, empirical evidence of how and to what extent cooperatives facilitate the technology adoption extensity, defined as the number of technologies adopted by a farmer from a wide range of agricultural...

Although private or community initiatives for biodiversity conservation (such as land trusts) have a strong tradition in many countries, rigorous evidence of recently evolved movements in post-socialist countries is missing. This study describes the evolution of Czech land trust movement and analyses their representatives' motivation for engagement...

Drawing on Luhmannian social systems theory, this article revisits the single- versus multiple-objective debate on the theory of the firm. Firms are conceptualized as complexity reducing systems structurally coupled with potentially risky environments, and profit maximization is considered as a complexity reduction strategy for making sense of thes...

We study the problem of the renewal of workers’ intrinsic and pro-social motivations in democratic work settings, as found in Italian social enterprises, organizations in the social economy that deliver social and welfare services. Building upon institutional, system, and management theory we hypothesize that social enterprises value and protect pr...

This paper explores the potential of big data, such as those compiled by the Google Books project, to inform the dominant theories of the firm that tend to be grounded on strong assumptions about the capitalist nature of the modern society. Combining the novel methodologies of the digital age with Niklas Luhmann's theory of functional differentiati...

Purpose This paper aims to probe the limits of the empirical-normative divide as a conceptual framework in business ethics. Design/methodology/approach A systems theory perspective debunks this divide as a false distinction that cannot do justice to the conceptual complexity of the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) scholarship. Findi...

This research note is a rejoinder to Steve Wallis' commentary on our paper "The limits of transparency: a systems theory view" (Valentinov, Verschraegen, van Assche, 2019)

Seeking to advance a big data approach to social theory, Roth et al. (2017) applied the Google Ngram Viewer toexplore the way the evolution of the function systems of the modern society is reflected in the Google Bookscorpus. The authors produced a highly counterintuitivefinding that the modern Western societies cannot beadequately described as cap...

Purpose The stakeholder theory encompasses instrumental and normative varieties whose mutual relationship remains unclear and exhibits a classic tension between rational self-interest and moral motivation. The purpose of this paper is to develop a strategy for navigating this tension. Design/methodology/approach Niklas Luhmann’s social systems the...

The agricultural sector in transitional and emerging market economies is marked by the prominence of agroholdings, i.e., conglomerates of agricultural enterprises controlling up to hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland. Drawing on secondary information from Ukraine, this paper explores how institutional turbulence gives rise to agroholdings...

Over the past decades, the modernization of agriculture in the Western world has contributed not only to a rapid increase in food production but also to environmental and societal concerns over issues such as greenhouse gas emissions, soil quality and biodiversity loss. Many of these concerns, for example those related to animal welfare or labor co...

The paper explores the implications of Ludwig von Bertalanffy's general systems theory for the current debates on the nature of organizational transparency as an element of good governance. If transparency implies the exchange of information, then it may be taken, at a metaphorical level, to constitute a dimension of metabolism theorized by Bertala...

Based on biological insights, Ludwig von Bertalanffy coined general systems theory (GST) and later expanded his perspective, exploring what GST could mean for other disciplines and other types of systems. We make a case for the relevance, or rather, the importance, of GST for coming to a new understanding of the resilience of social‐ecological syst...

The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on the issue of preference heterogeneity in cooperatives. Drawing on the ideas of Habermas and Luhmann, this paper interprets preference heterogeneity of cooperative members in terms of the precarious relationship between the categories of “system” and “lifeworld.” It is argued that the sensitivity of...

Niklas Luhmann held a skeptical view of the role of morality in the modern society. The present paper reassesses this skepticism in view of his early work showing the regime of functional differentiation to be supported by fundamental human rights. Building on this argument, the paper advocates a more positive view of morality which is shown to be...

Cooperative scholars acknowledge that there exists a sense in which cooperative organizations are supposed to combine economic and social identities, and in this sense to exhibit “double nature” (Iliopoulos and Valentinov, 2018; 2017). In the history of cooperative thought, the double nature of cooperatives has been prominently elaborated by Georg...

The agricultural sector in Ukraine and other transitional and developing countries is distinguished by the prominence of agroholdings, i.e., large-scale industrialized corporations, that offer extensive support to their stakeholders through the corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. The stakeholder approach as a part of business ethics...

Purpose – The theoretical understanding of CSR is caught on the horns of the dilemma between the ethical and instrumental approaches. „the strategic turn“ in CSR has brought the dilemma to a new head. The purpose of the paper is to develop a novel argumentative strategy to address the dilemma. Design/methodology/approach – The paper weaves togeth...

Purpose: Are entrepreneurial opportunities discovered or created? The debate around this question has crucial implications for successful organizational change management in the business world. The present conceptual paper transcends this debate by embedding the concept of the entrepreneurial opportunities within a Luhmannian systems – theoretical...

Purpose The economic theory of the firm apparently concurs with Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems with regard to the primary function of the firm to be complexity reduction, i.e. the alleviation of the cognitive burden on agents whose cognitive capacities are limited. At the same time, however, the theory of the firm ignores the attendant...

Despite popular misconceptions, cooperatives present a very successful organizational form worldwide. A recent study found that in the U.S., for example, 134 agricultural cooperatives celebrated their 100th anniversary in 2014. This observation on cooperative longevity is not matched by a corresponding research effort on what makes cooperatives so...

Purpose Public debates on the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are strongly influenced by the nongovernmental organization (NGO)-led advocacy, most of which is harshly critical of genetic engineering. This advocacy has resulted in discourse failures marked by the disregard for the scientific consensus on the risks and benefits of GMOs....

The remarkable feature of the nonprofit sector is its astonishing diversity. This feature gets short shrift in the traditional market or governmental failure theories of the nonprofit sector. Drawing on Niklas Luhmann's concept of functional differentiation, we demonstrate that these theories are implicitly economy-and politics-biased. In seeking t...

All over the globe, cooperatives are plagued by pervasive member heterogeneity problems that are induced by the radical and dynamic changes in the business environment. Most current solutions to these problems emphasize strengthening member loyalty and commitment. Yet, many of these solutions are symptomatic rather than fundamental. Searching for f...

Highlights • Foresights and futures studies depend on the adequacy of our knowledge of the present and the past. • Big data evidence suggests that the English language area was not capitalist between 1800 and 2000. • Popular social macro trend statements ought to be regularly scrutinised so as to reduce the risk that inadequate trend assumptions ar...

We bring the theory of the for-profit firm to bear on the economics of nonprofit organization by re-examining the literature on the delineation of organizational boundaries and the determination of cost-effective governance mechanisms. This is enabled by explicit consideration of nonprofit firms’ mission orientation as nonprofits engage in activiti...

The agricultural sector in many industrialised countries remains in the spotlight of controversial societal debates that testify to an advancing alienation between modern agriculture and society. Key issues include animal welfare, environmental externalities, industrialisation of agricultural production, and the extinction of family farms. As stead...

Taking account of the widest possible range of consequences of one’s action takes center stage in John Dewey’s pragmatist ethics which likewise acknowledges that the ability to do so depends on the individual moral character. In contrast, Luhmann’s theory of complexity-reducing systems underscores the difficulties that social systems experience in...

The Luhmannian idea of functional differentiation offers a novel and radical systems-theoretic framework reinforcing the institutionalist vision of the embeddedness of the economic system in the societal and natural environment. Reflecting on Steffen Roth’s article, I formulate two complementary arguments. The first is that any self-organized compl...

Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on the issue of preference heterogeneity in cooperatives. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on the ideas of Habermas and Luhmann, this paper interprets preference heterogeneity of cooperative members in terms of the precarious relationship between the categories of “system” and...

Sustainability is an important topic for understanding and developing our society (including business, government, and NGOs). For scholars who want their academic contributions to have an impact, sustainability is important for our conceptual systems (including theories, models, and policies). Because our conceptual systems share similarities with...

The present paper discusses the response of the Austrian and Slovak nonprofits to the recent migration crisis. In both countries, nonprofits delivered crucial problem-solving contributions but faced serious challenges related to scaling up, capacity building , and improving coordination. Drawing on the Luhmannian systems-theoretic approach , the pa...

This short paper is a commentary on Van Assche et al.’s (2017) article on "Power/knowledge and natural resource management: Foucaultian foundations in the analysis of adaptive governance" in Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning. A Luhmannian systems-theoretic perspective proposed in this commentary reaffirms the Foucaultian conceptualizatio...

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Central Asian countries have been faced with numerous development challenges in agriculture, especially those related to water use. Well-intentioned foreign donors and development agencies have stepped in to support local farmers, research centers, and public authorities in devising innovative solut...

Drawing inspiration from American institutionalism and new institutional economics, this paper discusses the rise of large corporate farms as the transition from the classic capitalist firm to the corporate form of organization based on the separation of ownership and control. Three case studies from the Brazilian cerrado show the rise of large cor...

The present paper builds on the Rawlsian critique of utilitarianism in order to identify the moral implications of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. While Luhmann aptly discerned the pervasive problems of the precarious system–environment relations throughout the modern society, he took moral communication to be person-centered and thus ill-e...

One paradox of modern society is the widespread use of highly complex mechanisms of economic and social self-regulation which produce a large number of unintended and often undesirable side-effects. Human conceptual systems (theories, policies, and mental models which support our thinking) are good enough to keep the self-regulatory mechanisms in o...

By reviewing the most influential literature on the theory of agricultural cooperatives, we try to elucidate the multilayered nature of both their structure and purpose, and place this into the wider context of the ever present debate on the true nature of cooperative identity. To this end, we ask two questions. The first one concerns the nature of...

Purpose – The rise of the general systems theory in the twentieth century would not have been possible without the concept of feedback. Of special interest to the present paper is Niklas Luhmann’s reconstruction and critique of Wiener’s cybernetic approach to the feedback concept. Luhmann has suggested that the operation of the feedback-controlled...

The paper reconstructs Niklas Luhmann’s diagnosis of the dysfunctional character of moral communication in the modern society by emphasizing the emergent character of today’s moral problems. In the systems-theoretic literature, emergence means the irreducibility of the properties of the whole to the characteristics of its parts. Two arguments have...

The agricultural sector in Germany, in the EU, and other industrialised countries remains in the spotlight of controversial societal debates that testify to an advancing alienation between modern agriculture and society. Key issues include animal welfare, environmental externalities, industrialisation of agricultural production, and extinction of f...

Though structural change in the agricultural sector has huge merits for economic development, the public opinion on structural change is quite negative. On the one hand, structural change does hardly lead to Pareto superior outcomes. On the other hand, there are concerns that structural change may go along with negative social externalities which m...

Purpose The complexity of the modern world calls for the increasingly complex (i.e. containing more concepts) and systemic (i.e. containing more causal connections between the concepts) conceptual systems, such as theories and mental models which may exist at varying levels of complexity and systemicity. Yet, these systems are often found to be imp...

The goal of the paper is to analyze the economic determinants of the non-profit sector in Slovakia. In contrast to the neoclassical market failure approach, we build on the institutionalist and systems-theoretic framework that draws attention to the shortcomings of the dominant institutional structures of the private for-profit and public sectors....

Some nonprofit economists tend to see nonprofit commercialization as a moral dilemma because commercial activities may secure organizational survival at the cost of undermining the mission orientation. The present paper argues that this type of moral framing of the commercialization debate is hardly adequate for the transitional context of the Czec...

The goal of the paper is to analyse the economic determinants of the non-profit sector in Slovakia. In contrast to the neoclassical market failure approach, we build on the institutionalist and systems-theoretic framework that draws attention to the shortcomings of the dominant institutional structures of the private for-profit and public sectors....

Economic development of transition and developed countries is associated with increasingly unhealthy dietary habits among low-income population segments. Drawing on Ulrich Beck’s sociological theory of risk society, the present research note calls attention to the positive relation between national economic development and food risks that result in...

The public discourse on the acceptability of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is not only controversial, but also infused with highly emotional and moralizing rhetoric. Although the assessment of risks and benefits of GMOs must be a scientific exercise, many debates on this issue seem to remain impervious to scientific evidence. In many cases,...

Drawing inspiration from Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, the present note argues that the complexity of social systems has the potential to undermine their sustainability and thus to generate social dilemmas. The conceptual construct of the ‘complexity-sustainability trade-off’ is invoked to make the point that ensuring sustainability, if a...

Vieles spricht derzeit für eine zunehmende Entfremdung zwischen Landwirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Begleitet wird dieser Prozess von einer Ideologisierung der politischen Diskussionen. Um dieser Problematik zu entgehen, reicht es nicht aus, der Öffentlichkeit mehr Informationen über die heutige Produktionsmethoden zu vermitteln. Vielmehr ist die Land...

We develop a social systems theory perspective on Central Asian post-Socialist transition, placing particular emphasis on the coordination problems in transboundary water governance. The extensive Soviet water-energy infrastructure around the Amudarya and Syrdarya rivers required coordination, but this could no longer be politically secured after t...

One paradox of modern society is the widespread use of highly complex mechanisms of economic and social self-regulation which produce a large number of unintended and often undesirable side-effects. Human conceptual systems (theories, policies, and mental models which support our thinking) are good enough to keep the self-regulatory mechanisms in o...