Recent developments in systems theory have replaced the paradigm of the whole and its parts with the paradigm of system and environment. System differentiation, therefore, has to be conceived as the reduplication of the difference between system and environment within systems. Differentiation is the reflexive form of system building. In the special case of the society as the encompassing social system, this approach makes it possible (1) to analyse different types of differentiation (i.e. segmentation, stratification, and functional differentiation) within a common conceptual framework, (2) to elaborate on internal problems of differentiated societies, basing the autonomy of subsystems on the multiplication of system references for functional orientation, performance, and reflexion, and (3) to prepare the theoretical integration of systems theory and the theory of evolution. Resume Des developpements recents dans la theorie des systemes viennent de remplacer le paradigme du tout et de ses composants par celui du paradigme du systeme et de son milieu. Par consequent, la differentiation du systeme doit etre concue comme le redoublement de la difference qui existe entre le systeme et l'environnement a l'interieur des systemes. La differentiation represente la forme reflechie de la construction d'un systeme. Dans le cas special de la societe concue comme systeme social ambiant, cette approche permet de rendre possible (1) l'analyse des types varies de differentiation (a savoir la segmentation, la stratification et la differentiation fonctionnelle) a l'interieur d'un cadre conceptuel commun; (2) d'etudier en detail les problemes internes des societes differenciees, en basant l'autonomie des sous-systemes sur la multiplication des references appliquees aux systemes pour l'orientation, fonctionnelle l'execution et la reflexion; et (3) de preparer l'integration theorique de la th6orie des systemes et de la th6orie de l'volution.

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The concept of organization took on clearer contours only in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the Middle Ages there had been no need for a special concept for what we now call organizations. It would have lacked substance: the stratification of family households and corporations provided for social order, which for the rest was subject to a multiplicity of legal arrangements. 1 Only in the nineteenth century did it become usual to conceptualize the organization as a social formation distinct from other social orders (e.g., communities or social classes). Then the term "organization" found its way into normal, everyday and scientific usage to describe a special type of object. Already frequent in the eighteenth century, it originally referred to the order of organic life as opposed to artifacts and mechanisms. 2 Jean Paul had still regarded the term organization with reference to non-organic matters as a metaphor, 3 but himself wrote about the organization of texts in the sense of actively ordering production. 4 Perhaps the transition to an active, activity-related usage of the term generalized the concept. At any rate, the concept of organization, originally, offered the possibility of referring to both an activity and its effect without addressing this difference.Because the eighteenth century tended to replace hierarchical distinctions by the distinction between "inside" and "outside," in the semantic field of organization we already find the distinction between internal and external relations. This enabled the disorganization concept to be introducedseparately from any hierarchical architecture of the world and with reference to the internal defects of an organism. At about the same time, biology and demography adopted a new concept relating to the individual: "population," which deprived the old genus/species schema of much of its significance and prepared the way for the evolution theory of the nineteenth century. In explaining internal organization, however, the whole/parts schema persisted, and thus the assumption of a harmony tuned to this schema, almost in the old sense of ordinata concordia. The distinction 1

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