Author(s):
Hans-Joachim Asmus



Title:
The concept of culture in Niklas Luhmann’s system theory in oder to describe and analyse the police officers’ handling of migrants and migrant victims

Abstract:
Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory allows for a more precise differentiation between personal ideas and concepts on the one hand, and culture on the other, as two discrete systems than any other theoretical perspectives. This theoretical approach is applied to police officers‘ everyday culture and institutional police culture, with special respect to their handling of migrants and migrant victims. This casts doubt on the hypostatisation of stability and rigidity of police institutional and police officer’s cultures; also, police attitudes can no longer be interpreted as directly representative of their culture. For intercultural continuing education and training for police, which is generally seen as necessary, the reflection of matters taken for granted in acting as well as in interpretations of meaning (observations of the second order) is seen as the central mechanism of possible modifications of attitudes and of cultural crystallisations. The limits of systems theory are discussed in this context.