Who Sets Deadlines? from Niklas Luhmann’s Sociological Theory of Time and Deadlines

We encounter numerous "deadlines" in our everyday lives. In fact, I will only be able to present at the 5th ISA Forum of Sociology if I complete all the necessary procedures, such as the submission of the abstract, the registration for participation, the application for travel expenses, and so on, within the fixed deadlines. In this presentation, we will consider "who sets deadlines" in organizations and society, based on Niklas Luhmann's thoughts on deadlines.

Similar to decision-making, deadlines are set through certain processes, and within those processes, there are the people who participate in setting the deadline. However, the deadlines set within organizations and society, as well as all other types of decision-making, are not determined solely by the arbitrary decisions of specific individuals. Rather, they are fixed through various processes of social learning and negotiations involving many actors, following precedents. Therefore, just as the abstract of this session discusses about decision-making, the algorithmization of deadline setting can also be discussed as an issue.

In this presentation, I first examine a theoretical framework for discussing deadlines sociologically, specifically for considering who sets deadlines in organizations and society, how they are set, how these deadlines are used, and what consequences they bring about. To do so, I refer to Niklas Luhmann's sociological theory of time and his article "The Scarcity of Time and the Urgency of Deadlines," which focuses on deadlines as an issue. From Luhmann’s discussion on this issue, I particularly utilize the conception of time as a medium of communication and the idea of deadlines as a temporal form for observing social events.