Towards a Social Theory of School Administrative Practice in a Complex, Chaotic, Quantum World.

Educational administration, like many other social sciences, has traditionally followed the rubrics of classical science with its emphasis on prediction and control and attempts to understand the whole by understanding in ever finer detail how the parts fit together. However, the "new" science (especially quantum mechanics, complexity, and chaos theory) has challenged the view that to understand the parts is to understand the whole. Scientists now take into account such phenomena as holism and emergence, self-reference, self-renewal, self-organization, and autonomy. In recent times social scientists have incorporated these understandings from the new science into the social sciences. This paper presents some of the theories of one such social scientist, Niklas Luhmann. The first part applies Luhmann's theory to the field of school administration. The next two parts consider the usefulness of the theory of schools as self-referential systems, first as a framework for research, and second, as a basis for understanding the social reality in which administrators operate. (Contains 45 references.) (LMI)