Unpacking polycontextural complications: a reflexive systems-theoretical heuristic for tracing intersystemic...

This paper outlines meta-theoretical and research-practical ways of engaging with polycontextural constellations in intersystemic organizational implementation endeavors. Through the case of the implementation of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in primary schools, we develop a systems-theoretical heuristic for empirically analyzing intersystemic dynamics while explicitly systematizing the theory-building process. Drawing on qualitative interviews and ethnographic data from three school development processes in Germany, we reconstruct organizational re-combination processes from a differentiation-theoretical perspective. Rather than applying the theory subsumptively, we employ social-ontological and society-theoretical concepts in a reflexive oscillation between empirical and theoretical enrichment. Along the horizontal and vertical axes of Luhmannian system(-level) differentiation, we systematize translation cascades and identify two polycontextural complications that only become analytically accessible through systematic analysis of code dynamics and operational couplings. At the first-order level, "contingency incongruence" emerges as competency-based learning concepts encounter a binary-coded contingency of the established program. Interorganizational workshops convened between schools and consultancing organizations to address this reveal a second-order complication: The "a-addressability" of workshop participants renders the intervention unreachable beyond the boundaries of the emergent third system. The generalization of these findings suggests that polycontextural complications are not incidental but structurally inherent to intersystemic implementation processes.