Trust, Legitimacy and Institutional Failure In Turbulent Times: Sociocybernetic Perspectives

Trust is a functional necessity of modern societies. As Niklas Luhmann argued, trust reduces complexity by enabling social actors to act in the face of uncertainty. Yet contemporary societies are increasingly confronted by crises of trust affecting political institutions, scientific expertise, legal systems, media organizations, and other institutional domains. In a period marked by democratic backsliding, geopolitical conflict, environmental crises, technological transformation, and growing social polarization, questions concerning trust, legitimacy, and institutional resilience have acquired renewed sociological importance.

From a sociocybernetic perspective, trust and distrust are not merely individual attitudes but communicative phenomena embedded within complex and functionally differentiated social systems. Disturbances affecting one social domain may generate consequences in others, producing wider challenges for governance, social integration, and collective decision-making. Understanding how trust is established, maintained, challenged, or restored therefore represents a key task for contemporary sociology.

Sociocybernetics offers distinctive resources for analysing these dynamics. Approaches drawing on systems theory, second-order cybernetics, complexity theory, and related perspectives enable researchers to examine how trust, legitimacy, and institutional failure are observed, communicated, and processed across society. In particular, Luhmann's distinction between trust and confidence, theories of structural coupling, and approaches centred on observation and reflexivity provide important analytical tools for understanding contemporary transformations.

This session welcomes both theoretical and empirical contributions and aims to advance sociocybernetic understandings of trust, legitimacy, and institutional change under conditions of increasing societal turbulence.