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In both Western culture and contemporary social theory, the term person is commonly used as an equivalent of human being, individual and subject. Faced with this substantialist semantics, and starting from the recovery of the original meaning of the Latin term persona, carried out by de baroque political philosophie to theoretical cement the emerging european states. To do this, a genealogical tour will be carried out that will start with Thomas Hobbes analysis of the person as an actor. We will then review some of the most conspicuous representatives of the sociological tradition, in whose work the person is conceptualizated not merely as an actor, but as an social actor. To do this, we will explore the Works of Tönnies, Simmel and Goffman -in the latter case, in connection with Mead's theory of self-. Finally, base don the concepts of double contingency and communication, as constitutive problema and characteristic operation of the social systems, the article propose a socio-structural radicalization of the sociological approach to the person, in order to determine conceptually which basic needs of the social orders meets the construction of human beings as social actors, and how this construction is the key factor for the structuring of their consciousness, wich leads to the development of the self. The fundamental thesis on wich this sociological radicalization is based is the interpretation of the person as one of the basic forms of social structuring: the social addressing; that is, the understanding of human beings as social addresses that help to determine and reduce the complexity os social systems as systems of communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - This essay attempts to answer the question, "What distinguishes inter-human influence from other forms of influence?" Design/methodology/approach - Specifying the micro-foundations of social structures in terms of communicative inferences necessitates a revision of the concept of social structures (and institutions) as distributed, and hence, uncertain, structures of expectation. Institutional realities are generated in linguistic interaction through the indirect communication of generic references. The generalizing function of language - in particular, abstraction and memory - coupled with its reflexive function, to turn references into things, are sufficient to generate both social structures and institutions as collective inferences. Findings - Social relations are fundamentally communicative relations. The communicative relation is triadic, implying an enunciator, an audience, and some referential content. Through linguistic communication, humans are capable of communicating locally with others about others nonlocally. Institutions exist only as expectations concerning the expectations of others. These expectations, however, are not only in the mind, and they are not exclusively psychological entities. Linguistically, these expectations appear as the reported statement within the reporting statement, that is, they are constituted through indirect discourse. Research limitations/implications - An important implication for current sociological theory is that, from the point of view of a sociology defined as communication about communication from within communication, institutional realities should not be reified as existing naturalistically or objectively above or behind the communications through which they are instantiated. Originality value - This approach, then, is decidedly anti-"realist." The goal of such research is to examine the inadequacy of nonreflexive models of social order. Accounts of how sets of social relationships emerge will remain inadequate if they do not reflect upon the cognitive and communicative processes which make possible the consideration of such structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses three ways of explaining the emergence of the social as a reality in itself. This implies the recognition of the social as specific area of the world not reducible to others. Thus, we review three proposals of different theoretical traditions in order to substantiate this perspective. We analyze, first, the notion of reciprocity developed by Malinowski, second, the assumptions about the order of the interaction proposed by Goffman, and thirdly, Luhmann's observations about the double contingency. Beyond the differences between these three social theories, we think they are comparable to the extent addressed in a similar manner possible conditions that give rise to the social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I argue that in Parsons' later works there is an implicit alternative to his normative solution to the problem of order. Luhmann's theory of self-reference and Pizzorno's notion of mutual identification are firstly invoked to recast the Parsonsian problematic in a `post-normative' light. On the basis of Parsons' later theory of societal solidarity, ritual and myth, I propose further that his concept of symbolic communication of affect delineates the process through which individuals recognize each other and thereby constitute social order. Mediated with symbols that are grounded in the human condition, communication of affect may substitute institutionalization of value to be the condition of possibility of social order. I also demonstrate that the significance of affect is a theme shared by the Chinese tradition of Confucianism, which is introduced to refine the humanistic intent of Parsons' theory and broaden its scope of applicability outside the Western context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the ego/alter ego constellation of social interaction. Every social interaction constitutes a situation with double contingency, which is recognized as such by both sides: both know that both know that one could also act differently. The circularity of the relationship brings about indeterminacy; self-commitment would presuppose that others commit themselves and vice versa. How is this infinity problem solved? How can we account for the possibility of social interaction, and social order? Both Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann have devoted considerable attention to the theorem of double contingency. Here, I analyze their theoretical formulations on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]